Liberalism and Social Action

By JOHN DEWEY

*

The Quest for Certainty
Individualism Old and New
Philosophy and Civilization
Art as Experience
Liberalism and Social Action

LIBERALISM

AND

SOCIAL ACTION

*

By JOHN DEWEY

The Page-Barbour Lectures

MINTON BALCH
BOOK

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1935, BY JOHN DEWEY

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, must
not be reproduced in any form without permission.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO THE MEMORY OF
JANE ADDAMS

PREFACE

T HE chapters that follow were delivered as lectures
at the University of Virginia upon the Page-Barbour
Foundation. Some passages have been rewritten and
the last chapter somewhat enlarged for publication. I
wish to express my thanks to the friends, old and new,
who did so much to make my stay at the University an
enjoyed occasion. I wish also to thank Herbert W.
Schneider and Sidney Hook for reading the manuscript
and for criticism and comments of which I have freely
availed myself. Needless to say, they are not responsible
for what I have written. No reference to literature seems
to be required, but I am glad to have an opportunity to
express my sense of the incalculable worth of the En-
cyclopaedia of the Social Sciences to all students.

There are two requests I should like to make of read-
ers of the volume, not to forestall criticism but that it
may be rendered, perhaps, more pertinent. Three lec-
tures do not permit one to say all he thinks, nor even all
that he believes that he knows. Omission of topics and
themes does not, accordingly, signify that I should have
passed them by in a more extended treatment. I par-
ticularly regret the enforced omission of reference to

vii

Vlll PREFACE

the relation of liberalism to international affairs. I
should also like to remind readers that not everything
can be said in the same breath and that it is necessary
to stress first one aspect and then another of the general
subject. So I hope that what is said will be taken as a
whole and also in comparison and contrast with alterna-
tive methods of social action.

New York City,

May, 1935 .

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I THE HISTORY OF LIBERALISM

II THE CRISIS IN LIBERALISM

III RENASCENT LIBERALISM

PAGE

1

28

56

* I *

THE HISTORY OF
LIBERALISM

Ijiberalism has long been accustomed to onslaughts
proceeding from those who oppose social change. It has
long been treated as an enemy by those who wish to
maintain the status quo . But today these attacks are mild
in comparison with indictments proceeding from those
who want drastic social changes effected in a twinkling
of an eye, and who believe that violent overthrow of
existing institutions is the right method of effecting the
required changes. From current assaults, I select two
as typical: “A liberal is one who gives lip approval to
the grievances of the proletariat, but who at the critical
moment invariably runs to cover on the side of the
masters of capitalism.” Again, a liberal is defined as
“one who professes radical opinions in private but who
never acts upon them for fear of losing entree into the
courts of the mighty and respectable.” Such statements
might be cited indefinitely. They indicate that, in the
minds of many persons, liberalism has fallen between
two stools, so that it is conceived as the refuge of those

unwilling to take a decided stand in the social conflicts

1

2 LIBERALISM AND

going on. It is called mealy-mouthed, a milk-and-water
doctrine and so on.

Popular sentiment, especially in this country, is sub-
ject to rapid changes of fashion. It was not a long time
ago that liberalism was a term of praise; to be liberal
was to be progressive, forward-looking, free from
prejudice, characterized by all admirable qualities. I do
not think, however, that this particular shift can be dis-
missed as a mere fluctuation of intellectual fashion.
Three of the great nations of Europe have summarily
suppressed the civil liberties for which liberalism
valiantly strove, and in few countries of the Continent
are they maintained with vigor. It is true that none of
the nations in question has any long history of devotion
to liberal ideals. But the new attacks proceed from those
who profess they are concerned to change not to preserve
old institutions. It is well known that everything for
which liberalism stands is put in peril in times of war.
In a world crisis, its ideals and methods are equally
challenged; the belief spreads that liberalism flourishes
only in times of fair social weather.

It is hardly possible to refrain from asking what
liberalism really is; what elements, if any, of permanent
value it contains, and how these values shall be main-
tained and developed in the conditions the world now
faces. On my own account, I have raised these ques-
tions. I have wanted to find out whether it is possible
for a person to continue, honestly and intelligently, to
be a liberal, and if the answer be in the affirmative,
what kind of liberal faith should be asserted today.

SOCIAL ACTION 3

Since I do not suppose that I am the only one who has
put such questions to himself, I am setting forth the
conclusions to which my examination of the problem
has led me. If there is danger, on one side, of cowardice
and evasion, there is danger on the other side of losing
the sense of historic perspective and of yielding precipi-
tately to short-time contemporary currents, abandon-
ing in panic things of enduring and priceless value.

The natural beginning of the inquiry in which we are
engaged is consideration of the origin and past develop-
ment of liberalism. It is to this topic that the present
chapter is devoted. The conclusion reached from a brief
survey of history, namely, that liberalism has had
a chequered career, and that it has meant in practice
things so different as to be opposed to one another,
might perhaps have been anticipated without prolonged
examination of its past. But location and description of
the ambiguities that cling to the career of liberalism
will be of assistance in the attempt to determine its
significance for today and tomorrow.

The use of the words liberal and liberalism to denote
a particular social philosophy does not appear to occur
earlier than the first decade of the nineteenth century.
But the thing to which the words are applied is older.
It might be traced back to Greek thought; some of its
ideas, especially as to the importance of the free play
of intelligence, may be found notably expressed in the
funeral oration attributed to Pericles. But for the present
purpose it is not necessary to go back of John Locke,
the philosopher of the “glorious revolution” of 1688 .

4 LIBERALISM AND

The outstanding points of Locke’s version of liberalism
are that governments are instituted to protect the rights
that belong to individuals prior to political organization
of social relations. These rights are those summed up a
century later in the American Declaration of Independ-
ence: the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happi-
ness. Among the “natural” rights especially emphasized
by Locke is that of property, originating, according to
him, in the fact that an individual has “mixed” himself,
through his labor, with some natural hitherto unappro-
priated object. This view was directed against levies on
property made by rulers without authorization from the
representatives of the people. The theory culminated in
justifying the right of revolution. Since governments are
instituted to protect the natural rights of individuals,
they lose claim to obedience when they invade and
destroy these rights instead of safeguarding them: a
doctrine that well served the aims of our forefathers in
their revolt against British rule, and that also found an
extended application in the French Revolution of 1789.

The impact of this earlier liberalism is evidently
political. Yet one of Locke’s greatest interests was to
uphold toleration in an age when intolerance was rife,
persecution of dissenters in faith almost the rule, and
when wars, civil and between nations, had a religious
color. In serving the immediate needs of England — and
then those of other countries in which it was desired
to substitute representative for arbitrary government —
it bequeathed to later social thought a rigid doctrine
of natural rights inherent in individuals independent

SOCIAL ACTION 5

of social organization. It gave a directly practical import
to l lie older semi-theological and semi-metaphysical con-
ceplion of natural law as supreme over positive law
jiihI gave a new version of the old idea that natural
hi w is the counterpart of reason, being disclosed by the
imlural light with which man is endowed.

The whole temper of this philosophy is individualistic
in Lhe sense in which individualism is opposed to or-
ganized social action. It held to the primacy of the
individual over the state not only in time but in moral
aulhority. It defined the individual in terms of liberties
of ihought and action already possessed by him in some
mysterious ready-made fashion, and which it was the
sole business of the state to safeguard. Reason was also
made an inherent endowment of the individual, ex-
pressed in men’s moral relations to one another, but
imL sustained and developed because of these relations.

1 1 followed that the great enemy of individual liberty
was ihought to be government because of its tendency
to encroach upon the innate liberties of individuals,
later liberalism inherited this conception of a natural
antagonism between ruler and ruled, interpreted as a
natural opposition between the individual and organized
society. There still lingers in the minds of some the
notion that there are two different “spheres” of action
and of rightful claims; that of political society and
Lhat of the individual, and that in the interest of the
latter the former must be as contracted as possible. Not
Lill the second half of the nineteenth century did the idea
arise that government might and should be an instru-

6 liberalism and

ment for securing and extending the liberties of indi-
viduals. This later aspect of liberalism is perhaps
foreshadowed in the clauses of our Constitution that
confer upon Congress power to provide for “public
welfare” as well as for public safety.*

What has already been said indicates that with Locke
the inclusion of the economic factor, property, among
I natural rights had a political animus. However, Locke
1 at times goes so far as to designate as property every-
thing that is included in “life, liberties and estates”;
the individual has property in himself and in his life
and activities; property in this broad sense is that which
political society should protect. The importance attached
to the right of property within the political area was
without doubt an influence in the later definitely eco-
nomic formulation of liberalism. But Locke was inter-
ested in property already possessed. A century later
industry and commerce were sufficiently advanced in
Great Britain so that interest centered in production of
wealth, rather than in its possession. The conception of
labor as the source of right in property was employed
not so much to protect property from confiscation by
the ruler (that right was practically secure in England)
as to urge and justify freedom in the use and invest-
ment of capital and the right of laborers to move about
and seek new modes of employment — claims denied by

* Probably in the minds of the framers of the Constitution not much
more was contemplated by this clause than the desirability of permit-
ting Congress to make appropriations for roads, rivers and harbors. In
subsequent practice, the power has not been used much beyond pro-
vision of limited social services for those at an economic disadvantage.

SOCIAL ACTION 7

I lie common law that came down from semi-feudal
conditions. The earlier economic conception may fairly
In s called static; it was concerned with possessions and
chI/iIcs. The newer economic conception was dynamic.

I I was concerned with release of productivity and ex-
change from a cumbrous complex of restrictions that
had the force of law. The enemy was no longer the
arhilrary special action of rulers. It was the whole sys-
lem of common law and judicial practice in its adverse
hearing upon freedom of labor, investment and ex-
change.

The transformation of earlier liberalism that took
place because of this new interest is so tremendous that
ils story must be told in some detail. The concern for'
liberty and for the individual, which was the basis of
1 s ockeian liberalism, persisted ; otherwise the newer
theory would not have been liberalism. But liberty was
given a very different practical meaning. In the end,
the effect was to subordinate political to economic activ-
ity; to connect natural laws with the laws of production
and exchange, and to give a radically new significance
to the earlier conception of reason. The name of Adam
Smith is indissolubly connected with initiation of this
transformation. Although he was far from being an
unqualified adherent of the idea of laissez faire , he held
that the activity of individuals, freed as far as possible
from political restriction, is the chief source of social
welfare and the ultimate spring of social progress. He
held that there is a “natural” or native tendency in
every individual to better each his own estate through

S LIBERALISM AND

» putting forth effort (labor) to satisfy his natural wants.
Social welfare is promoted because the cumulative, but
undesigned and unplanned, effect of the convergence of
,a multitude of individual efforts is to increase the com-
modities and services put at the disposal of men col-
lectively, of society. This increase of goods and services
creates new wants and leads to putting forth new modes
of productive energy. There is not only a native impulse
to exchange, to “truck , 59 but individuals are released by
the processes of exchange from the necessity for labor
in order to satisfy all of the individual’s own wants;
through division of labor, productivity is enormously
increased. Free economic processes thus bring about an
endless spiral of ever increasing change, and through
the guidance of an “invisible hand” (the equivalent of
the doctrine of preestablished harmony so dear to the
eighteenth century) the efforts of individuals for per-
sonal advancement and personal gain accrue to the
benefit of society, and create a continuously closer knit
interdependence of interests.

The ideas and ideals of the new political economy
were congruous with the increase of industrial activity
that was marked in England even before the invention
of the steam engine. They spread rapidly. Their power
was furthered when the great industrial and commercial
expansion of England ensued in the wake of the substitu-
tion of mechanical for human energy, first in textiles and
then in other occupations. Under the influence of the in-
dustrial revolution the old argument against political ac-
tion as a social agency assumed a new form. Such action

SOCIAL ACTION 9

WJIS ,l0t only an invasion of individual liberty but it was
in effect a conspiracy against tile causes that bring about
su. ial progress. The Lockeian idea of natural laws took
on 11 much more concrete, a more directly practical,

Natural law was still regarded as something

more fundamental than man-made law, which by com-
purison is artificial. But natural laws lost their remote
moral meaning. They were identified with the laws
"I * rce industrial production and free commercial ex-
change. Adam Smith, however, did not originate this
laller idea. He took it over from the French physiocrats,
who, as the name implies, believed in rule of social
relations by natural law and who identified natural
vvi 1 1, economic law.

I 1 ranee was an agricultural country, and the economy
of the physiocrats was conceived and formulated in the
1 merest of agriculture and mining. Land, according to
llicm, is the source of all wealth; from it comes ulti-
mately all genuinely productive force. Industry, as dis-
tinct from agriculture, merely reshapes what nature
provides. The movement was essentially a protest against
governmental measures that were impoverishing the agri-
culturalist and that enriched idle parasites. But its
underlying philosophy was the idea that economic laws
are the true natural laws while other laws are artificial
and hence to be limited in scope as far as possible. In
an ideal society political organization will be modeled
upon the economic pattern set by nature. Ex natura, jus.

Locke had taught that labor, not land, is the source
of wealth, and England was passing from an agrarian

LIBERALISM AND

10

to an industrialized community. The French doctrine in
its own form did not fit into the English scene. But
there was no great obstacle against translating the under-
lying ideal of the identity of natural law with economic
law into a form suited to the needs of an industrial
community. The shift from land to labor (the expendi-
ture of energy for the satisfaction of wants) required
only, from the side of the philosophy of economics, that
attention be centered upon human nature, rather than
upon physical nature. Psychological laws, based on
human nature, are as truly natural as are any laws
based on land and physical nature. Land is itself pro-
ductive only under the influence of the labor put forth
in satisfaction of intrinsic human wants. Adam Smith
was not himself especially interested in elaborating a
formulation of laws in terms of human nature. But he
explicitly fell back upon one natural human tendency,
sympathy, to find the basis for morals, and he used
other natural impulses, the instincts to better one’s condi-
tion and to exchange, to give the foundation of economic
theory. The laws of the operations of these natural tend-
encies, when they are freed from artificial restraints,
are the natural laws governing men in their relations to
one another. In individuals, the exercise of sympathy in
accordance with reason (that is, in Smith’s conception,
from the standpoint of an impartial spectator) is the
norm of virtuous action. But government cannot appeal
to sympathy. The only measures it can employ affect the
motive of self-interest. It makes this appeal most effec-
tively when it acts so as to protect individuals in the

SOCIAL ACTION

exercise of their natural self-interest. These ideas, im-

l " n, 1 ,n ^ mith ’ were made ex PKcit by his successors: in
|"ul >y t e classical school of economists and in part

7. M Tl ham and the Mills, father and son. For a con-
, .le P enod th ese two schools worked hand in hand
Economists developed the principle of the free eco-
-m,,c activity of individuals; since this freedom was
identified with absence of governmental action, con-

"f 311 T fer rr ith natUral libert * the result
' ' ormulation of laissez faire liberalism. Bentham

carried the same conception, though from a different

° f VI6W ’ mt0 a vl gorous movement for reform of
lie common law and judicial procedure by means of
legislative action. The Mills developed the psychological

,0glCal delation implicit in the theories of the

economists and of Bentham.

J begin with Bentham. The existing legal system was
intimately bound up with a political system based upon

, Pr " d ° mina nce of the great landed proprietors
l.li lough the rotten borough system. The operation of
*e new industrial forces in both production and
exchange was checked and deflected at almost every
I’omt by a mass of customs that formed the core
of common law. Bentham approached the situation not
I'om the standpoint of individual liberty but from the
standpoint of the effect of these restrictions upon the
nappmess enjoyed by individuals. Every restriction upon
n herty is ipso facto a source of pain and a limitation
o a pleasure that might otherwise be enjoyed. Hence
effect was the same in the two doctrines as far as the

12 LIBERALISM and

rigteM province of ^ «

Bentham’ s assault was aimed directly, not j

fike the theory of the economists, upon everything m
eating law and judicial procedure that miteed un-
necessary pain and that limited the acquisition o
pleasured by individuals. Moreover, his psychology

converted the impulse to improve one's condition upon

which Adam Smith had built into the doctrine A*
desire for pleasure and aversion to pain are the sole
f„ ces that govern human action. The psychological
theory Implicit in the idea of industry and exchange
controlled by desire for gain was then worked out upo
the political and legal side. Moreover, the constant
expansion of manufacturing and trade put t e orce
a powerful class interest behind the new version of
liberalism. This statement does not imply that the intel-
lectual leaders of the new liberalism were themselve
moved by hope of material gain. On the contrary, ey
Tied a group animated by a

in contrast with their professed theones. T J J

detachment from the immediate interests of the nunket
place liberated them from the narrowness and short
sightedness that marked the trading class-a class a
John Stuart Mill adverted to with even more bittern®
than did Adam Smith. This emancipation enabled t
detect and make articulate die nascent movemeids of
Iheir time — a function that defines the genuine work of
die intellectual class at any period. But they “ig «
been as voices crying in the wilderness if wha, they

SOCIAL ACTION 13

l. infill had not coincided with the interests of a class
lliat was constantly rising in prestige and power.

According to Bentham, the criterion of all law and
of every administrative effort is its effect upon the sum
id happiness enjoyed by the greatest possible number.
In calculating this sum, every individual is to count as
ime and only as one. The mere formulation of the doc-
It ine was an attack upon every inequality of status that
had the sanction of law. In effect, it made the well-being
of I lie individual the norm of political action in every
area in which it operates. In effect, though not wholly in
I ten I ham’s express apprehension, it transferred atten-
lion from the well-being already possessed by indi-
viduals to one they might attain if there were a radical
change in social institutions. For existing institutions
enabled a small number of individuals to enjoy their
pleasures at the cost of the misery of a much greater
number. While Bentham himself conceived that the
changes to be made in legal and political institutions
were mainly negative, such as abolition of abuses, cor-
ruptions and inequalities, nevertheless (as we shall see
later) there was nothing in his fundamental doctrine
I hat stood in the way of using the power of government
lo create, constructively and positively, new institutions
if and when it should appear that the latter would con-
I ribute more effectively to the well-being of individuals.

Bentham’s best known work is entitled Principles of
Morals and Legislation . In his actual treatment “morals
and legislation” form a single term. It was the morals
of legislation, of political action generally, with which

14 LIBERALISM AND

he occupied himself, his standard being the simple one
of determination of its effect upon the greatest possible
happiness of the greatest possible number, lie labored
incessantly to expose the abuses of the existing legal
system and its application in judicial procedures civil
and criminals and in administration. He attacked these
abuses, in his various works, in detail, one by one. But
his attacks were cumulative in effect since he applied a
single principle in his detailed criticism. He was, we
may say, the first great muck-raker in the field of law.
But he was more than that. Wherever he saw a defect,
he proposed a remedy. He was an inventor in law and
administration, as much so as any contemporary in
mechanical production. He said of himself that his ambi-
tion was to “extend the experimental method of reason-
ing from the physical branch to the moral” — meaning,
in common with English thought of the eighteenth cen-
tury, by the moral the human. He also compared his
own work with what physicists and chemists were doing
in their fields in invention of appliances and processes
that increase human welfare. That is, he did not limit
his method to mere reasoning; the latter occurred only
for the sake of instituting changes in actual practice.
History shows no mind more fertile than his in invention
of legal and administrative devices. Of him and his
school, Graham Wallas said, “The fact that the fall
from power of the British aristocracy in 1832 led neither
to social revolution or administrative chaos at home, nor
to the break-up of the new British Empire abroad was
largely due to the political expedients local govern-

SOCIAL ACTION 15

mm l reform, open competition in the civil service,
nr i n ) I i fie health and police administration, colonial
nr I ( -government, Indian administrative reform — which
Itrnll lam’s disciples either found in his writings, or
developed, after his death, by his methods.” *

The work of Bentham, in spite of fundamental defects
in bis underlying theory of human nature, is a demon-
M rat ion that liberalism is not compelled by anything in
its own nature to be impotent save for minor reforms.
Itentham’s influence is proof that liberalism can be a
I lower in bringing about radical social changes: — pro-
vided it combine capacity for bold and comprehensive so-
ria I invention with detailed study of particulars and with
eon rage in action. The history of the legal and adminis-
trative changes in Great Britain during the first half of
the nineteenth century is chiefly the history of Bentham
and his school. I think there is something significant for
the liberalism of today and tomorrow to be found in
the fact that his group did not consist in any large
measure of politicians, legislators or public officials.
On the American principle of “Let George do it,”
liberals in this country are given to supposing and
hoping that some Administration when in power will
lake the lead in formulating and executing liberal poli-
cies. I know of nothing in history that justifies the belief
and hope. A liberal program has to be developed, and
in a good deal of particularity, outside of the immediate
realm of governmental action and enforced upon public

* Article on Bentham in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,
Vol. II, p. 519.

16 LIBERALISM AND

attention, before direct political action of a thorough-
going liberal sort will follow. This is one lesson we
have to learn from early nineteenth-century liberalism.
Without a background of informed political intelligence,
direct action in behalf of professed liberal ends may
end in development of political irresponsibility.

Bentham’s theory led him to the view that all or-
ganized action is to be judged by its consequences, con-
sequences that take effect in the lives of individuals.
His psychology was rather rudimentary. It made him
conceive of consequences as being atomic units of
pleasures and pains that can be algebraically summed
up. It is to this aspect of his doctrines that later writers,
especially moralists, have chiefly devoted their critical
attention. But this particular aspect of his theory, if we
view it in the perspective of history, is an adventitious
accretion. His enduring idea is that customs, institutions,
laws, social arrangements are to be judged on the basis
of their consequences as these come home to the indi-
viduals that compose society. Because of his emphasis
upon consequences, he made short work of the tenets
of both of the two schools that had dominated, before
his day, English political thought. He brushed aside,
almost contemptuously, the conservative school that
found the source of social wisdom in the customs and
precedents of the past. This school has its counterpart
in those empiricists of the present day who attack every
measure and policy that is new and innovating on the
ground that it does not have the sanction of experience,
when what they really mean by “experience” is patterns

SOCIAL ACTION 17

nl mind that were formed in a past that no longer exists.

Bill Bentham was equally aggressive in assault upon
tli;il aspect of earlier liberalism which was based upon
ill <! conception of inherent natural rights — following in
lli is respect a clew given by David Hume. Natural rights
fin 'I natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mytho-
logical social zoology. Men do not obey laws because
lliry Lhink these laws are in accord with a scheme of
imlural rights. They obey because they believe, rightly
nr wrongly, that the consequences of obeying are upon

I lie whole better than the consequences of disobeying.

II I lie consequences of existing rule become too intoler-
able, they revolt. An enlightened self-interest will induce
a i ii lor not to push too far the patience of subjects. The
enlightened self-interest of citizens will lead them to
Oblain by peaceful means, as far as possible, the changes
I bat; will effect a distribution of political power and
I he publicity that will lead political authorities to work
Co i* rather than against the interests of the people — a
situation which Bentham thought was realized by govern-
ment that is representative and based upon popular
suffrage. But in any case, not natural rights but conse-
quences in the lives of individuals are the criterion and
measure of policy and judgment.

Because the liberalism of the economists and the
Benthamites was adapted to contemporary conditions in
Great Britain, the influence of the liberalism of the
school of Locke waned. By 1820 it was practically
extinct. Its influence lasted much longer in the United
States. We had no Bentham and it is doubtful whether

18 LIBERALISM AND

he would have had much influence if he had appeared.
Except for movements in codification of law, it is hard
to find traces of the influence of Bentham in this country.
As was intimated earlier, the philosophy of Locke bore
much the same relation to the American revolt of the
colonies that it had to the British revolution of almost a
century earlier. Up to, say, the time of the Civil War,
the United States were predominantly agrarian. As they
became industrialized, the philosophy of liberty of indi-
viduals, expressed especially in freedom of contract,
provided the doctrine needed by those who controlled
the economic system. It was freely employed by the
courts in declaring unconstitutional legislation that
limited this freedom. The ideas of Locke embodied in
the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our
pioneer conditions that gave individuals the opportunity
to carve their own careers. Political action was lightly
thought of by those who lived in frontier conditions. A
political career was very largely annexed as an adjunct
to the action of individuals in carving their own careers.
The gospel of self-help and private initiative was prac-
ticed so spontaneously that it needed no special intellec-
tual support. Finally, there was no background of
feudalism to give special leverage to the Benthamite
system of legal and administrative reform.

The United States lagged more than a generation
behind Great Britain in promotion of social legislation.
Justice Holmes found it necessary to remind his fellow
Justices that, after all, the Social Statics of Herbert
Spencer had not been enacted into the American Con-

SOCIAL ACTION

19

util in ion. Great Britain, largely under Benthamite influ-
ence, built up an ordered civil service independent of
pulii ical party control. With us, political emoluments,
like, economic pecuniary rewards, went to the most enter-
pi ising competitor; to the victor belong the spoils. The
principle of the greatest good to the greatest number
tended to establish in Great Britain the supremacy of
national over local interests. The political history of the
IJniled States is largely a record of domination by
regional interests. Our fervor in law-making might be
allied to Bentham’s principle of the “omnicompetence”
id die legislative body. But we have never taken very
Seriously the laws we make, while there has been little
comparable in our history to the importance attached to
administration by the English utilitarian school.

I have mentioned two schools of liberalism in Great
I h i lain, that of the economists and of the utilitarians.
Ai first they walked the same path. The later history of
I i I >eralism in that country is largely a matter of a grow-
ing divergence, and finally of an open split. While
Bentham personally was on the side of the classical
economists, his principle of judgment by consequences
lends itself to opposite application. Bentham himself
urged a great extension of public education and of action
in behalf of public health. When he disallowed the
doctrine of inalienable individual natural rights, he
removed, as far as theory is concerned, the obstacle to
positive action by the state whenever it can be shown
that the general well-being will be promoted by such
action. Dicey in his Law and Opinion in England has

20 LIBERALISM AND

shown that collectivist legislative policies gained in force
for at least a generation after the sixties. It was stimu-
lated, naturally, by the reform bills that greatly broad-
ened the basis of suffrage. The use of scientific method,
even if sporadic and feeble, encouraged study of actual
consequences and promoted the formation of legisla-
tive policies designed to improve the consequences
brought about by existing institutions. At all events, in
connection with Benthamite influence, it greatly weak-
ened the notion that Reason is a remote majestic power
that discloses ultimate truths. It tended to render it an
agency in investigation of concrete situations and in
projection of measures for their betterment.

I would not, however, give the impression that the
trend away from individualistic to collectivistic liber-
alism was the direct effect of utilitarianism. On the con-
trary, social legislation was fostered primarily by Tories,
who, traditionally, had no love for the industrialist class.
Benthamite liberalism was not the source of factory
laws, laws for the protection of child and women, pre-
vention of their labor in mines, workmen’s compensation
acts, employers’ liability laws, reduction of hours of
labor, the dole, and a labor code. All of these measures
went contrary to the idea of liberty of contract fostered
by laissez faire liberalism. Humanitarianism, in alliance
with evangelical piety and with romanticism, gave
chief support, from the intellectual and emotional side,
to these measures, as the Tory party was their chief
political agent. No account of the rise of humanitarian
sentiment as a force in creation of the new regulations

SOCIAL ACTION 21 '

"I industry would be adequate that did not include the
""incs of religious leaders drawn from both dissenters
"i"l die Established Church. Such names as Wilberforce,
« l/nkson, Zachary, Macaulay, Elizabeth Fry, Hannah
Mine, as well as Lord Shaftesbury, come to mind. The
nudes unions were gaining power and there was an
"'live socialist movement, as represented by Robert
< •wen. But in spite of, or along with, such movements,
"<■ have to remember that liberalism is associated with
f'eiierosity of outlook as well as with liberty of belief
"ud action. Gradually a change came over the spirit and
""'""ing of liberalism. It came surely, if gradually, to
I"' disassociated from the laissez faire creed and to’ be
Associated use of governmental action for aid

l" I hose at economic disadvantage and for alleviation
"I dieir conditions. In this country, save for a small
of adherents to earlier liberalism, ideas and poli-
cies of this general type have virtually come to define
die meaning of liberal faith. American liberalism as
illustrated in the political progressivism of the early
| ""sent century has so little in common with British
liberalism of the first part of the last century that it
"lands in opposition to it.

Lhe influence of romanticism, as exemplified in dif-
Iercnt ways by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Carlyle and
Kuskin, is worthy of especial note. These men were po-
litically allied as a rule with the Tory party, if not ac-
lively, at least in sympathy. The romanticists were all of
them vigorous opponents of the consequences of the
industrialization of England, and directed their assaults

22 LIBERALISM AND

at the economists and Benthamites whom they held largely
responsible for these consequences. As against depend-
ence upon uncoordinated individual activities, Coleridge
emphasized the significance of enduring institutions.
They, according to him, are the means by which men
are held together in concord of mind and purpose, the
only real social bond. They are the force by which human
relations are kept from disintegrating into an aggregate
of unconnected and conflicting atoms. His work and that
of his followers was a powerful counterpoise to the anti-
historic quality of the Benthamite school. The leading
scientific interest of the nineteenth century came to be
history, including evolution within the scope of history.
Coleridge was no historian; he had no great interest in
historical facts. But his sense of the mission of great
historic institutions was profound. Wordsworth preached
the gospel of return to nature, of nature expressed in
rivers, dales and mountains and in the souls of simple
folk. Implicitly and often explicitly he attacked indus-
trialization as the great foe of nature, without and
within. Carlyle carried on a constant battle against
utilitarianism and the existing socio-economic order,
which he summed up in a single phrase as “anarchy
plus a constable.” He called for a regime of social
authority to enforce social ties. Ruskin preached the
social importance of art and joined to it a denunciation
of the entire reigning system of economics, theoretical
and practical. The esthetic socialists of the school of
William Morris carried his teachings home to the
popular mind.

t

SOCIAL ACTION 23

romantic movement profoundly affected some
' ';.' d gr "™ U P “ lho smallest sect of laUsez fuire

brrnlism. The mtellectnal career of John Stuart Mill
a valiant if unsuccessful struggle reconcile tlie

"T derlved " a, “os« in infancy, from his father
1 a feeling of their hollowness when compared with

V “' U ' S ° f PO®* ° f ^ring historic institutions

,h , e ,n " er life " portrayed by the romanticists.

was >“ 1 y sensitive to the brutality of life about
and its low intellectual level, and saw the relation
a lwcen these two traits. At one time, he even went so
as to say that he looked forward to the coming of
age when the division of the produce of labor.

° m “, de „ by c0ncert 011 “ acknowledged principle
JUS ice. e asserted that existing institutions were
""■rely provisional, and that the “laws” governing the
distribution of wealth are not social but of man’s eon-
1 "vance and are man’s to change. A long distance lies
"'tween the philosophy embodied in such sayings and
"" earlier assertion that “the sole end for which man-
kind are warranted, individually or collectively, in
mi erfenng with the freedom of action of any person is
». -protection.’ The romantic school was the chief
influence in effecting the change.

There was in addition another intellectual force at
work m changing the earlier liberalism, which openly
professed libera] aims while at the same time attacking
' irher liberalism. The name of Thomas Hill Green is
not widely kn own outside of technical philosophical
me es. But he was the leader in introducing into Eng.

24 liberalism and

land, in coherent formulation, the organic idealism that
originated in Germany-and that originated there
largely in reaction against the basic philosophy oi
individualistic liberalism and individualistic empiricism.
John Mill himself was greatly troubled by the com®,
quences that followed from the psychological doctrine
of associationalistn. Mental bonds in belief and purpose
which are the product of external associations can easily
be broken when circumstances change. The mora an
social consequence is a threatened destruction of al
stable bases of belief and social relationship. Green and
his followers exposed this weakness m all phases of the
atomistic philosophy that had developed under the
alleged empiricism of the earlier liberal school. They
criticized piece by piece almost every item of the theory
of mind, knowledge and society that had grown out ol
the teachings of Locke. They asserted that relations con-
stitute the reality of nature, of mind and of society.
But Green and his followers remained faithful, as the
romantic school did not, to the ideals of liberalism; the
conceptions of a common good as the measure of politi-
cal organization and policy, of liberty as the most
precious trait and very seal of individuality, of the
claim of every individual to the full development of
his capacities. They strove to provide unshakeable
objective foundations in the very structure of things
for these moral claims, instead of basing them upon
the sandy ground of the feelings of isolated human
beings For the relations that constitute the essentia
nature of things are, according to them, the expression

SOCIAL ACTION 25

sl jin objective Reason and Spirit that sustains nature
nml ihc human mind.

The idealistic philosophy taught that men are held
lugdlier by the relations that proceed from and that
nmnifest an ultimate cosmic mind. It followed that the
Ibis is of society and the state is shared intelligence and
purpose, not force nor yet self-interest. The state is a
moral organism, of w r hich government is one organ.
Only by participating in the common intelligence and
tJuning in the common purpose as it works for the
common good can individual human beings realize their
line individualities and become truly free. The state is
luil one organ among many of the Spirit and Will that
holds all things together and that makes human beings
members of one another. It does not originate the moral
claim of individuals to the full realization of their
potentialities as vehicles of objective thought and pur-
pose. Moreover, the motives it can directly appeal to
are not of the highest kind. But it is the business of the
slate to protect all forms and to promote all modes of
1 1 uinan association in which the moral claims of the
members of society are embodied and which serve as
l lie means of voluntary self-realization. Its business is
negatively to remove the obstacles that stand in the way
of individuals coming to consciousness of themselves
for what they are, and positively to promote the cause
of public education. Unless the state does this work
i I is no state. These philosophical liberals pointed out
I he restrictions, economic and political, which prevent
many, probably the majority, of individuals from the

26 LIBERALISM AND

voluntary intelligent action by which they may become
what they are capable of becoming. The teachings of
this new liberal school affected the thoughts and actions
of multitudes who did not trouble themselves to under-
stand the philosophical doctrine that underlay it. They
served to break down the idea that freedom is some-
thing that individuals have as a ready-made possession,
and to instill the idea that it is something to be achieved,
while the possibility of the achievement was shown
to be conditioned by the institutional medium in which
an individual lives. These new liberals fostered the idea
that the state has the responsibility for creating institu-
tions under which individuals can effectively realize
the potentialities that are theirs.

Thus from various sources and under various influ-
ences there developed an inner split in liberalism. This
cleft is one cause of the ambiguity from which liber-
alism still suffers and which explains a growing impo-
tency. There are still those who call themselves liberals
who define liberalism in terms of the old opposition
between the province of organized social action and the
province of purely individual initiative and effort. In
the name of liberalism they are jealous of every exten-
sion of governmental activity. They may grudgingly
concede the need of special measures of protection and
alleviation undertaken by the state at times of great
social stress, but they are the confirmed enemies of
social legislation (even prohibition of child labor), as
standing measures of political policy. Wittingly or un-
wittingly, they still provide the intellectual system of

SOCIAL ACTION 27

Ipologetics for the existing economic regime, which
lliey strangely, it would seem ironically, uphold as a
Mgime of individual liberty for all.

I hit the majority who call themselves liberals today
are committed to the principle that organized society
miisL use its powers to establish the conditions under
wliich the mass of individuals can possess actual as
(lisiinct from merely legal liberty. They define their
liberalism in the concrete in terms of a program of
measures moving toward this end. They believe that
I lie conception of the state which limits the activities
°l latter to keeping order as between individuals
11,1(1 to securing redress for one person when another
person infringes the liberty existing law has given him,
is in effect simply a justification of the brutalities and
inequities of the existing order. Because of this internal
division within liberalism its later history is wavering
and confused. The inheritance of the past still causes
many liberals, who believe in a generous use of the
powers of organized society to change the terms on
wliich human beings associate together, to stop short
with merely protective and alleviatory measures — a fact
I bat partly explains why another school always refers
to 6 reform” with scorn. It will be the object of the next
chapter to portray the crisis in liberalism, the impasse
m which it now almost finds itself, and through criticism
of the deficiences of earlier liberalism to suggest the
way in which liberalism may resolve the crisis, and
emerge as a compact, aggressive force.

* II *

THE CRISIS IN
LIBERALISM

The net effect of the struggle of early liberals to
^emancipate individuals from restrictions imposed upon
jthem by the inherited type of social organization was
to pose a problem, that of a new social organization. The
ideas of liberals set forth in the first third of the nine-
teenth century were potent in criticism and in analysis.
They released forces that had been held in check. But
analysis is not construction, and release of force does
not of itself give direction to the force that is set free.
Victorian optimism concealed for a time the crisis at
which liberalism had arrived. But when that optimism
vanished amid the conflict of nations, classes and races
characteristic of the latter part of the nineteenth century
— a conflict that has grown more intense with the passing
years — the crisis could no longer be covered up. The
beliefs and methods of earlier liberalism were ineffec-
tive when faced with the problems of social organiza-
tion and integration. Their inadequacy is a large part
of belief now so current that all liberalism is an out-
moded doctrine. At the same time, insecurity and un-

28

SOCIAL ACTION 29

certainty in belief and purpose are powerful factors in
generating dogmatic faiths that are profoundly hostile
li» everything to which liberalism in any possible for-
mulation is devoted.

In a longer treatment, the crisis could be depicted in
lerms of the career of John Stuart Mill, during a period
when the full force of the crisis was not yet clearly
manifest. He records in his Autobiography that, as early
as 1826 , he asked himself this question: “Suppose that
all your objects in life were realized: that all the
changes in institutions and opinions which you are look-
ing forward to, could be completely effected at this
very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness
lo you?” His answer was negative. The struggle for
liberation had given him the satisfaction that comes
Irom active struggle. But the prospect of the goal
attained presented him with a scene in which something
unqualifiedly necessary for the good life was lacking.
He found something profoundly empty in the spectacle
he imaginatively faced. Doubtless physical causes had
something to do with his growing doubt as to whether
life would be worth living were the goal of his ambitions
realized; sensitive youth often undergoes such crises.
But he also felt that there was something inherently
superficial in the philosophy of Bentham and his father.
This philosophy now seemed to him to touch only the
externals of life, but not its inner springs of personal
sustenance and growth. I think it a fair paraphrase to
say that he found himself faced with only intellectual
abstractions. Criticism has made us familiar with the

30 LIBERALISM AND

abstraction known as the economic man. The utilitarians
added the abstraction of the legal and political man.
But somehow they had failed to touch man himself. Mill
first found relief in the fine arts, especially poetry, as a
medium for the cultivation of the feelings, and reacted
against Benthamism as exclusively intellectualistic, a
theory that identified man with a reckoning machine.
Then under the influence of Coleridge and his disciples
he learned that institutions and traditions are indis-
pensable to the nurture of what is deepest and most
worthy in human life. Acquaintance with Comte’s
philosophy of a future society based on the organization
of science gave him a new end for which to strive, the
institution of a kind of social organization in which
there should be some central spiritual authority.

The life-long struggle of Mill to reconcile these ideas
with those which were deeply graven in his being by
his earlier Benthamism concern us here only as a symbol
of the enduring crisis of belief and action brought
about in liberalism itself when the need arose for uniting
earlier ideas of freedom with an insistent demand for
social organization, that is, for constructive synthesis
in the realm of thought and social institutions. The
problem of achieving freedom was immeasurably
widened and deepened. It did not now present itself
as a conflict between government and the liberty of
individuals in matters of conscience and economic
action, but as a problem of establishing an entire social
order, possessed of a spiritual authority that would
nurture and direct the inner as well as the outer life of

SOCIAL ACTION gj

"wlividuals. The problem of science was no longer
"KTcly technological applications for increase of ma-
lmi| l Productivity, hut imbuing the minds of indi-
viduals with the spirit of reasonableness, fostered by
?'/ ciaI organization and contributing to its development.
,,ie P ro Wem of democracy was seen to be not solved,
hardly more than externally touched, by the establish-
ment of universal suffrage and representative govern-
ment. As Havelock Ellis has said, “We see now that
ili<; vote and the ballot-box do not make the voter free
(mm even external pressure; and, which is of much
more consequence, they do not necessarily free him from
Ins own slavish instincts.” The problem of democracy
becomes the problem of that form of social organiza-
Imn, extending to all the areas and ways of living, in
which the powers of individuals shall not be merely
icleased from mechanical external constraint but shall
l»c fed, sustained and directed. Such an organization
demands much more of education than general school-
ing, which without a renewal of the springs of purpose
and desire becomes a new mode of mechanization and
I ormalization, as hostile to liberty as ever was govern-
mental constraint. It demands of science much more
Ilian external technical application — which again leads
lo mechanization of life and results in a new kind of
enslavement. It demands that the method of inquiry, of
discrimination, of test by verifiable consequences,’ be
naturalized m all the matters, of large and of detailed
scope, that arise for judgment.

The demand for a form of social organization that

32 LIBERALISM AND

should include economic activities but yet should con-
k vert them into servants of the development of the higher
j capacities of individuals, is one that earlier liberalism
' did not meet. If we strip its creed from adventitious ele-
ments, there are, however, enduring values for which
earlier liberalism stood. These values are liberty; the
development of the inherent capacities of individuals
made possible through liberty, and the central role of
free intelligence in inquiry, discussion and expression.
But elements that were adventitious to these values col-
ored every one of these ideals in ways that rendered
them either impotent or perverse when the new problem
of social organization arose.

Before considering the three values, it is advisable to
note one adventitious idea that played a large role in
the later incapacitation of liberalism. The earlier liberals
[lackedjiistoric sense and interest. For a while this lack
had an immediate pragmatic value. It gave liberals a
powerful weapon in their fight with reactionaries. For
it enabled them to undercut the appeal to origin, prec-
edent and past history by which the opponents of social
change gave sacrosanct quality to existing inequities
and abuses. But disregard of history took its revenge.
It blinded the eyes of liberals to the fact that their
own special interpretations of liberty, individuality and
intelligence were themselves historically conditioned, and
were relevant only to their own time. They put forward
their ideas as immutable truths good at all times and
places ; they had no idea of historic relativity, either in
general or in its application to themselves.

SOCIAL ACTION 33

When their ideas and plans were projected they were
mi attack upon the interests that were vested in estab-
lished institutions and that had the sanction of custom.
The new forces for which liberals sought an entrance
were incipient; the status quo was arrayed against their
release. By the middle of the nineteenth century the
eoiitemporary scene had radically altered. The economic
and political changes for which they strove were so
largely accomplished that they had become in turn the
v« sled interest, and their doctrines, especially in the
loi in of laissez faire liberalism, now provided the intel-
lectual justification of the status quo. This creed is still
powerful in this country. The earlier doctrine of “natural
1 1 glits, superior to legislative action, has been given a
definitely economic meaning by the courts, and used by
judges to destroy social legislation passed in the inter-
est of a real, instead of purely formal, liberty of con-
tract. Under the caption of “rugged individualism” it
inveighs against all new social policies. Beneficiaries of
die established economic regime band themselves to-
gether in what they call Liberty Leagues to perpetuate
I he harsh regimentation of millions of their fellows. I
do not imply that resistance to change would not have
appeared if it had not been for the doctrines of earlier
liberals. But had the early liberals appreciated the
historic relativity of their own interpretation of the
meaning of liberty, the later resistance would certainly
have been deprived of its chief intellectual and moral
support. The tragedy is that although these liberals were
the sworn foes of political absolutism, they were them-

34 liberalism and

selves absolutists in the social creed they formulated.

This statement does not mean, of course, that they
were opposed to social change; the opposite is evi-
dently the case. But it does mean they held that bene-
ficial social change can come about in but one way, the
way of private economic enterprise, socially undirected,
based upon and resulting in the sanctity of private
property— that is to say, freedom from social control.
So today those who profess the earlier type of liber-
alism ascribe to this one factor all social betterment
that has occurred; such as the increase in productivity
and improved standards of living. The liberals did not
try to prevent change, but they did try to limit its course
to a single channel and to immobilize the channel.

If the early liberals had put forth their special inter-
pretation of liberty as something subject to historic rela-
tivity they would not have frozen it into a doctrine to he
applied at all times under all social circumstances.
Specifically, they would have recognized that effective
liberty is a function of the social conditions existing
at any time. If they had done this, they would have
known that as economic relations became dominantly
controlling forces in setting the pattern of human rela-
tions, the necessity of liberty for individuals which they
proclaimed will require social control of economic
forces in the interest of the great mass of individu-
als. Because the liberals failed to make a distinction
between purely formal or legal liberty and effec-
tive liberty of thought and action, the history of the
last one hundred years is the history of non-fulfillment

SOCIAL ACTION 35

uf l heir predictions. It was prophesied that a regime of
feunomic liberty would bring about interdependence
nmong nations and consequently peace. The actual scene
I m s been marked by wars of increasing scope and
destructiveness. Even Karl Marx shared the idea that
I lie new economic forces would destroy economic nation-
alism and usher in an era of internationalism. The dis-
play of exacerbated nationalism now characterizing the
wo rid is a sufficient comment. Struggle for raw materials
and markets in backward countries, combined with for-
eign financial control of their domestic industrial de-
v < ■ lopment, has been accompanied by all kinds of
devices to prevent access of other advanced nations to
die national market-place.

The basic doctrine of early economic liberals was
diat the regime of economic liberty as they conceived
il, would almost automatically direct production through
competition into channels that would provide, as ef-
fectively as possible, socially needed commodities and
services. Desire for personal gain early learned that it
could better further the satisfaction of that desire by
stifling competition and substituting great combinations
of non-competing capital. The liberals supposed the
motive of individual self-interest would so release pro-
ductive energies as to produce ever-increasing abun-
dance. They overlooked the fact that in many cases
personal profit can be better served by maintaining
artificial scarcity and by what Veblen called systematic
sabotage of production. Above all, in identifying the
extension of liberty in all of its modes with extension of

36 LIBERALISM AND

their particular brand of economic liberty, they com-
pletely failed to anticipate the bearing of private control
of the means of production and distribution upon the
effective liberty of the masses in industry as well as m
cultural goods. An era of power possessed by the few
took the place of the era of liberty for all envisaged by
the liberals of the early nineteenth century.

These statements do not imply that these liberals
should or could have foreseen the changes that would
occur, due to the impact of new forces of production.
The point is that their failure to grasp the historic posi-
tion of the interpretation of liberty they put forth served
later to solidify a social regime that was a chief ob-
stacle to attainment of the ends they professed. One
aspect of this failure is worth especial mention. No one
has ever seen more clearly than the Benthamites that the
political self-interest of rulers, if not socially checked
and controlled, leads to actions that destroy liberty for
the mass of people. Their perception of this fact was a
chief ground for their advocacy of representative gov-
ernment, for they saw in this measure a means by which
the self-interest of the rulers would be forced into con-
formity with the interests of their subjects. But they
had no glimpse of the fact that private control of the
new forces of production, forces which affect the life
of every one, would operate in the same way as private
unchecked control of political power. They saw the need
of new legal institutions, and of different political con-
ditions as a means to political liberty. But they failed
to perceive that social control of economic forces is

SOCIAL ACTION

37

0<|iially necessary if anything approaching economic
<’<|uality and liberty is to be realized.

IJentham did believe that increasing equalization of
economic fortunes was desirable. He justified his opin-
ion of its desirability on the ground of the greater
happiness of the greater number: to put the matter
crudely, the possession of ten thousand dollars by a
lliousand persons would generate a greater sum of hap-
piness than the possession of ten million dollars by
one person. But he believed that the regime of economic
liberty would of itself tend in the direction of greater
equalization. Meantime, he held that “time is the only
mediator,” and he opposed the use of organized social
power to promote equalization on the ground that such
action would disturb the “security” that is even a greater
condition of happiness than is equality.

When it became evident that disparity, not equality,
was the actual consequence of laissez faire liberalism,
defenders of the latter developed a double system of
justifying apologetics. Upon one front, they fell hack
upon tlie natural inequalities of individuals in psycho-
logical and moral make-up, asserting that inequality
of fortune and economic status is the “natural” and
justifiable consequence of the free play of these inherent
differences. Herbert Spencer even erected this idea into
a principle of cosmic justice, based upon the idea of the
proportionate relation existing between cause and effect.

I fancy that today there are hut few who are hardy
enough, even admitting the principal of natural inequal-
ities, to assert that the disparities of property and in-

LIBERALISM AND

38

come bear any commensurate ratio to inequalities in tbr
native constitution of individuals. If we suppose thal
there is in fact such a ratio, the consequences are so
intolerable that the practical inference to be drawn is
that organized social effort should intervene to prevenl
the alleged natural law from taking full effect.

The other line of defense is unceasing glorification
of the virtues of initiative, independence, choice and
responsibility, virtues that center in and proceed from
individuals as such. I am one who believes that we need
more, not fewer, “rugged individuals” and it is in the
name of rugged individualism that I challenge the argu-
ment. Instead of independence, there exists parasitica]
dependence on a wide scale — witness the present need
for the exercise of charity, private and public, on a vast
scale. The current argument against the public dole on
the ground that it pauperizes and demoralizes those who
receive it has an ironical sound when it comes from
those who would leave intact the conditions that cause
the necessity for recourse to the method of support of
millions at public expense. Servility and regimentation
are the result of control by the few of access to means
of productive labor on the part of the many. An even
more serious objection to the argument is that it con-
ceives of initiative, vigor, independence exclusively in
terms of their least significant manifestation. They
are limited to exercise in the economic area. The
meaning of their exercise in connection with the cul-
tural resources of civilization, in such matters as com-
panionship, science and art, is all but ignored. It is at

SOCIAL ACTION 39

llxs last point in particular that the crisis of liberalism

! he “f d for a ^consideration of it in terms of the

h< mune lheration of individuals are most evident The
enormous exaggeration of material and materialistic
economics that now prevails at the expense of cultural
values, is not itself the result of earlier liberalism. But
as was illustrated in the personal crisis through which
passed, it is an exaggeration which is favored, both
intellectually and morally, by fixation of the early

lbs fact induces a natural transition from the con-^
cept of liberty to that of the individual. The underlying
philosophy and psychology of earlier liberalism led to
11, Conception of individuality as something ready-made
already possessed, and needing only the removal of cer-
“n ! fS aI restrictions to come into full play. It was not
conceived as a moving thing, something that is attained
on y y continuous growth. Because of this failure the

timrw 61106 ^ l-t °r individuaIs U P°« social condi-
... 1 38 ™ ade J ltUe of> 11 IS ^ue that some of the early

iberals, like John Stuart Mill, made much of the effect
o circumstances” in producing differences among in-
dividuals. But the use of the word and idea of “circum-
stances is significant. It suggests— and the context
bears out the suggestion-that social arrangements and
institutions were thought of as things that operate from
without, not entering in any significant way into the
internal make-up and growth of individuals. Social ar-
rangements were treated not as positive forces but as
ex ernal limitations. Some passages in Mill’s discussion

40 liberalism and

of the logic of the social sciences are pertinent. “Men
in a state of society are still men; their actions and
passions are obedient to the laws of individual human
nature. Men are not, when brought together, converted
into a different kind of substance, as hydrogen and
oxygen differ from water. . . . Human beings in society
have no properties but those which are derived from,
and may be resolved into, the laws of individual men.
And again he says: “The actions and feelings of men in
the social state are entirely governed by psychological
laws.” *

There is an implication in these passages that liberals
will be the last to deny. This implication is directly
in line with Mill’s own revolt against the creed in which
he was educated. As far as the statements are a warning
against attaching undue importance to merely external
institutional changes, to changes that do not enter into
the desires, purposes and beliefs of the very constitu-
tion of individuals, they express an idea to which liber-
alism is committed by its own nature. But Mill means
something at once less and more than this. While he
would probably have denied that he held to the notion
of a state of nature in which individuals exist prior to
entering into a social state, he is in fact giving a psy-
chological version of that doctrine. Individuals, it is
implied, have a full-blown psychological and moral na-
ture, having its own set laws, independently of their
association with one another. It is the psychological laws
of this isolated human nature from which social laws are
* The quotations are from Mill’s Logic, Book VI, chs. vii and ix.

SOCIAL ACTION 41

derived and into which they may be resolved. His own
illustration of water in its difference from hydrogen
mid oxygen on separation might have taught him better,
if it had not been for the influence of a prior dogma.
That the human infant is modified in mind and character
by his connection with others in family life and that
I lie modification continues throughout life as his con-
nections with others broaden, is as true as that hydrogen
is modified when it combines with oxygen. If we gen-
eralize the meaning of this fact, it is evident that while
(here are native organic or biological structures that
remain fairly constant, the actual “laws” of human
nature are laws of individuals in association, not of
beings in a mythical condition apart from association.
In other words, liberalism that takes its profession of
the importance of individuality with sincerity must be
deeply concerned about the structure of human asso-
ciation. For the latter operates to affect negatively
and positively, the development of individuals. Because
a wholly unjustified idea of opposition between indi-
viduals and society has become current, and because its
currency has been furthered by the underlying philos-
ophy of individualistic liberalism, there are many who
in fact are working for social changes such that rugged
individuals may exist in reality, that have become con-
temptuous of the very idea of individuality, while others
support in the name of individualism institutions that
militate powerfully against the emergence and growth
of beings possessed of genuine individuality.

It remains to say something of the third enduring

42 LIBERALISM AND

value in the liberal creed: — intelligence. Grateful recog-
nition is due early liberals for their valiant battle in
behalf of freedom of thought, conscience, expression
and communication. The civil liberties we possess, how-
ever precariously today, are in large measure the fruil
of their efforts and those of the French liberals who
engaged in the same battle. But their basic theory as to
the nature of intelligence is such as to offer no sure
foundation for the permanent victory of the cause they
espoused. They resolved mind into a complex of ex-
ternal associations among atomic elements, just as they
resolved society itself into a similar compound of ex-
ternal associations among individuals, each of whom
has his own independently fixed nature. Their psy-
chology was not in fact the product of impartial inquiry
into human nature. It was rather a political weapon
devised in the interest of breaking down the rigidity of
dogmas and of institutions that had lost their relevancy.
Mill’s own contention that psychological laws of the
kind he laid down were prior to the laws of men living
and communicating together, acting and reacting upon
one another, was itself a political instrument forged in
the interest of criticism of beliefs and institutions that
he believed should be displaced. The doctrine was po-
tent in exposure of abuses; it was weak for constructive
purposes. Bentham’s assertion that he introduced the
method of experiment into the social sciences held good
as far as resolution into atoms acting externally upon
one another, after the Newtonian model, was concerned.
It did not recognize the place in experiment of compre-

SOCIAL ACTION 43

li«‘nsive social ideas as working hypotheses in direction
of action.

The practical consequence was also the logical one.
When conditions had changed and the problem was one
»l constructing social organization from individual units
lhat had been released from old social ties, liberalism
fell upon evil times. The conception of intelligence as
something that arose from the association of isolated
elements, sensations and feelings, left no room for far-
reaching experiments in construction of a new social
order. It was definitely hostile to everything like col-
lective social planning. The doctrine of laissez faire was •»
applied to intelligence as well as to economic action,
although tlie conception of experimental method in sci-
1 nee demands a control by comprehensive ideas, pro-
jected in possibilities to he realized by action. Scientific
method is as much opposed to go-as-you-please in intel-
lectual matters as it is to reliance upon habits of mind
whose sanction is that they were formed by “expert-
ence” m the past. The theory of mind held by the early
liberals advanced beyond dependence upon the past but
U did not arrive at the idea of experimental and construe-
live intelligence.

The dissolving atomistic individualism of the liberal
school evoked by way of reaction the theory of organic
objective mind. But the effect of the latter theory em-
bodied in idealistic metaphysics was also hostile to
intentional social planning. The historical march of
mind, embodied in institutions, was believed to account
for social changes— all in its own good time. A similar

44 LIBERALISM AN1)

conception was fortified by the interest in history and in
evolution so characteristic of the later nineteenth cen-
tury. The materialistic philosophy of Spencer joined
hands with the idealistic doctrine of Hegel in throwing 1 1 ie
burden of social direction upon powers that are beyond
deliberate social foresight and planning. The economic
dialectic of history, substituted by Marx for the Hege-
lian dialectic of ideas, as interpreted by the social -
democratic party in Europe, was taken to signify an
equally inevitable movement toward a predestined goal.
Moreover, the idealistic theory of objective spirit pro-
vided an intellectual justification for the nationalisms
that were rising. Concrete manifestation of absolute
mind was said to be provided through national states.
Today, this philosophy is readily turned to the support
of the totalitarian state.

The crisis in liberalism is connected with failure to
develop and lay hold of an adequate conception of intel-
ligence integrated with social movements and a factor in
giving them direction. We cannot mete out harsh blame
to the early liberals for failure to attain such a concep-
tion. The first scientific society for the study of anthro-
pology was founded the year in which Darwin’s Origin
of Species saw the light of day. I cite this particular
fact to typify the larger fact that the sciences of society,
the controlled study of man in his relationships, are the
product of the later nineteenth century. Moreover, these
disciplines not only came into being too late to influence
the formulation of liberal social theory, but they them-
selves were so much under the influence of the more

SOCIAL ACTION 45

advanced physical sciences that it was supposed that
llieir findings were of merely theoretic import. By this
Hlalcment, I mean that although the conclusions of the
Hocial disciplines were about man, they were treated as
1 1 they were of the same nature as the conclusions of
/physical science about remote galaxies of stars. Social
\ m| d historical inquiry is in fact a part of the social
process itself, not something outside of it. The conse-
quence of not perceiving this fact was that the conclu-
sions of the social sciences were not made (and still are
not made in any large measure) integral members of
a program of social action. When the conclusions of
inquiries that deal with man are left outside the program
of social action, social policies are necessarily left
without the guidance that knowledge of man can provide,
and that it must provide if social action is not to be
directed either by mere precedent and custom or else
by the happy intuitions of individual minds. The social
conception of the nature and work of intelligence is still
immature; in consequence, its use as a director of social
action is inchoate and sporadic. It is the tragedy of
earlier liberalism that just at the time when the problem
of social organization was most urgent, liberals could
bring to its solution nothing but the conception that
intelligence is an individual possession.

It is all but a commonplace that today physical
knowledge and its technical applications have far out-
run our knowledge of man and its application in social
invention and engineering. What I have just said indi-
cates a deep source of the trouble. After all, our

46 LIBERALISM AND

accumulated knowledge of man and his ways, furnished
by anthropology, history, sociology and psychology, is
vast, even though it be sparse in comparison with our
knowledge of physical nature. But it is still treated as
so much merely theoretic knowledge amassed by special-
ists, and at most communicated by them in books and
articles to the general public. We are habituated to the
idea that every discovery in physical knowledge signi-
fies, sooner or later, a change in the processes of pio
diiction; there are countless persons whose business
it is to see that these discoveries take effect through
invention in improved operations in practice. There is
next to nothing of the same sort with respect to knowl-
edge of man and human affairs. Although the latter is
recognized to concern man in the sense of being about
him, it is of less practical effect than are the much
more remote findings of physical science.

The inchoate state of social knowledge is reflected in
the two fields where intelligence might be supposed to
be most alert and most continuously active, education
and the formation of social policies in legislation.
Science is taught in our schools. But very largely it
appears in schools simply as another study, to be ac-
quired by much the same methods as are employed in
“learning” the older studies that are part of the curric-
ulum. If it were treated as what it is, the method of
intelligence itself in action, then the method of science
would be incarnate in every branch of study and every
detail of learning. Thought would be connected with
the possibility of action, and every mode of action

SOCIAL ACTION 47

would be reviewed to see its bearing upon the habits
and ideas from which it sprang. Until science is treated
educationally in this way, the introduction of what is
called science into the schools signifies one more oppor-
tunity for the mechanization of the material and methods
of study. When “learning” is treated not as an expan-
sion of the understanding and judgment of meanings
hut as an acquisition of information, the method of
cooperative experimental intelligence finds its way into
the working structure of the individual only incidentally
and by devious paths.

Of the place and use of socially organized intelligence
in the conduct of public affairs, through legislation and
administration, I shall have something to say in the
next chapter. At this point of the discussion I am con-
tent to ask the reader to compare the force it now exerts
in politics with that of the interest of individuals and
parties in capturing and retaining office and power, with
that exercised by the propaganda of publicity agents and
that of organized pressure groups.

Humanly speaking, the crisis in liberalism was a
product of particular historical events. Soon after liberal
tenets were formulated as eternal truths, it became an
instrument of vested interests in opposition to further
social change, a ritual of lip-service, or else was shat-
tered by new forces that came in. Nevertheless, the idea^
of liberty, of individuality and of freed intelligence
have an enduring value, a value never more needed
than now. It is the business of liberalism to state these
values in ways, intellectual and practical, that are rele-

48 LIBERALISM AND

vant to present needs and forces. If we employ the con-
ception of historic relativity, nothing is clearer than
that the conception of liberty is always relative to forces
that at a given time and place are increasingly felt to
; be oppressive. Liberty in the concrete signifies release
from the impact of particular oppressive forces; eman-
cipation from something once taken as a normal part o(
j human life but now experienced as bondage. At one
time, liberty signified liberation from chattel slavery;
at another time, release of a class from serfdom. During
the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it
meant liberation from despotic dynastic rule. A century
later it meant release of industrialists from inherited
legal customs that hampered the rise of new forces of
production. Today, it signifies liberation from material
insecurity and from the coercions and repressions that
prevent multitudes from participation in the vast cul-
tural resources that are at hand. The direct impact of
liberty always has to do with some class or group that
is suffering in a special way from some form of con-
straint exercised by the distribution of powers that exists
in contemporary society. Should a classless society ever
come into being the formal concept of liberty would
lose its significance, because the fact for which it stands
would have become an integral part of the established
relations of human beings to one another.

Until such a time arrives liberalism will continue to
have a necessary social office to perform. Its task is the
mediation of social transitions. This phrase may seem
to some to be a virtual admission that liberalism is a

SOCIAL ACTION 49

colorless “middle of the road” doctrine. Not so, even
though liberalism has sometimes taken that form in
practice. We are always dependent upon the experience
(hat has accumulated in the past and yet there are
always new forces coming in, new needs arising, that
demand, if the new forces are to operate and the new
needs to be satisfied, a reconstruction of the patterns
of old experience. The old and the new have forever to
be integrated with each other, so that the values of old
experience may become the servants and instruments of
new desires and aims. We are always possessed by habits
and customs, and this fact signifies that we are always
influenced by the inertia and the momentum of forces
temporally outgrown but nevertheless still present with
us as a part of our being. Human life gets set in pat-
terns, institutional and moral. But change is also with
us and demands the constant remaking cf old habits and
old ways of thinking, desiring and acting. The effective
ratio between the old and the stabilizing and the new
and disturbing is very different at different times. Some-
times whole communities seem to be dominated by cus-
tom, and changes are produced only by irruptions and
invasions JY jin outside. Sometimes, as at present, change
is so varied and accelerated that customs seem to be dis-
solving before our very eyes. But be the ratio little or
great, there is always an adjustment to be made, and as
soon as the need for it becomes conscious, liberalism
has a function and a meaning. It is not that liberalism
creates the need, but that the necessity for adjustment
defines the office of liberalism.

50 LIBERALISM AND

For the only adjustment that does not have to In-
made over again, and perhaps even under more un-
favorable circumstances than when it was first attempted,
is that effected through intelligence as a method. In ils
large sense, this remaking of the old through union willi
the new is precisely what intelligence is. It is conversion
of past experience into knowledge and projection of
that knowledge in ideas and purposes that anticipate whal
may come to be in the future and that indicate how to
realize what is desired. Every problem that arises, per-
sonal or collective, simple or complex, is solved only by
selecting material from the store of knowledge amassed
in past experience and by bringing into play habits
already formed. But the knowledge and the habits have to
be modified to meet the new conditions that have arisen.
In collective problems, the habits that are involved are
traditions and institutions. The standing danger is either
that they will be acted upon implicitly, without recon-
struction to meet new conditions, or else that there will
he an impatient and blind rush forward, directed only
by some dogma rigidly adhered to. The office of intelli-
gence in every problem that either a person or a com-
munity meets is to effect a working connection between
old habits, customs, institutions, beliefs, and new condi-
tions. What I have called the mediating function of
liberalism is all one with the work of intelligence. This
fact is the root, whether it be consciously realized or not,
of the emphasis placed by liberalism upon the role of
freed intelligence as the method of directing social
action.

SOCIAL ACTION

51

Objections that are brought against liberalism ignore
I lie fact that the only alternatives to dependence upon
intelligence are either drift and casual improvisation, or
I lie use of coercive force stimulated by unintelligent emo-
tion and fanatical dogmatism — the latter being intoler-
ant by its very constitution. The objection that the method
of intelligence has been tried and failed is wholly aside
from the point, since the crux of the present situation
) is that it has not been tried under such conditions as
now exist. It has not been tried at any time with use
of all the resources that scientific material and the
experimental method now put at our disposal. It is also
said that intelligence is cold and that persons are moved
lo new ways of acting only by emotion, just as habit
makes them adhere to old ways. Of course, intelligence
does not generate action except as it is enkindled by
feeling. But the notion that there is some inherent
opposition between emotion and intelligence is a relic
of the notion of mind that grew up before the experi-
mental method of science had emerged. For the latter
method signifies the union of ideas with action, a union
that is intimate; and action generates and supports emo-
tion. Ideas that are framed to be put into operation
for the sake of guiding action are imbued with all the
emotional force that attaches to the ends proposed for
action, and are accompanied with all the excitement and
inspiration that attends the struggle to realize the ends.
Since the ends of liberalism are liberty and the oppor-
tunity of individuals to secure full realization of their
potentialities, all of the emotional intensity that belongs

LIBERALISM AND

52

to these ends gathers about the ideas and acts that arc
necessary to make them real.

Again, it is said that the average citizen is not en-
dowed with the degree of intelligence that the use <>l
it as a method demands. This objection, supported by
alleged scientific findings about heredity and by impres-
sive statistics concerning the intelligence quotients of
the average citizen, rests wholly upon the old notion
that intelligence is a ready-made possession of indi-
viduals. The last stand of oligarchical and anti-social
seclusion is perpetuation of this purely individualistic
notion of intelligence. The reliance of liberalism is
not upon the mere abstraction of a native endowment
unaffected by social relationships, but upon the fact
I that native capacity is sufficient to enable the average
I individual to respond to and to use the knowledge and
l the skill that are embodied in the social conditions in
which he lives, moves and has his being. There are few
individuals who have the native capacity that was re-
quired to invent the stationary steam-engine, locomotive,
dynamo or telephone. But there are none so mean that
they cannot intelligently utilize these embodiments of
intelligence once they are a part of the organized means
of associated living.

The indictments that are drawn against the intelli-
gence of individuals are in truth indictments of a social
order that does not permit the average individual to have
access to the rich store of the accumulated wealth of
^ mankind in knowledge, ideas and purposes. There does
not now exist the kind of social organization that even

it

SOCIAL ACTION 53

permits the average human being to share the poten-
I mlly available social intelligence. Still less is there a
social order that has for one of its chief purposes the *
establishment of conditions that will move the mass of
individuals to appropriate and use what is at hand.
Hack of the appropriation by the few of the material
resources of society lies the appropriation by the few
in behalf of their own ends of the cultural, the spiritual,
resources that are the product not of the individuals who
have taken possession but of the cooperative work of
humanity. It is useless to talk about the failure of
democracy until the source of its failure has been
grasped and steps are taken to bring about that type of
social organization that will encourage the socialized
extension of intelligence.

The crisis in liberalism, as I said at the outset, pro-
ceeds from the fact that after early liberalism had done
its work, society faced a new problem, that of social
organization. Its work was to liberate a group of indi-
viduals, representing the new science and the new forces
of productivity, from customs, ways of thinking, institu-
tions, that were oppressive of the new modes of social
action, however useful they may have been in their day.

The instruments of analysis, of criticism, of dissolution,
that were employed were effective for the work of
release. But when it came to the problem of organizing
the new forces and the individuals whose modes of life
they radically altered into a coherent social organiza-
tion, possessed of intellectual and moral directive power,
liberalism was well-nigh impotent. The rise of national

54 LIBERALISM AND

polities that pretend to represent the order, discipline
and spiritual authority that will counteract social dis-
integration is a tragic comment upon the unpreparedness'
of older liberalism to deal with the new problem which
its very success precipitated.

But the values of freed intelligence, of liberty, <>l
opportunity for every individual to realize the poten-
tialities of which he is possessed, are too precious to be
sacrificed to a regime of despotism, especially when the
regime is in such large measure merely the agent of a
dominant economic class in its struggle to keep and
extend the gains it has amassed at the expense of genuine
social order, unity, and development. Liberalism has to
gather itself together to formulate the ends to which it is
devoted in terms of means that are relevant to the con-
temporary situation. The only form of enduring social
organization that is now possible is one in which the
new forces of productivity are cooperatively controlled
and used in the interest of the effective liberty and the
cultural development of the individuals that constitute
society. Such a social order cannot be established by
an unplanned and external convergence of the actions
of separate individuals, each of whom is bent on per-
sonal private advantage. This idea is the Achilles heel
of early liberalism. The idea that liberalism cannot
maintain its ends and at the same time reverse its con-
ception of the means by which they are to be attained
is folly. The ends can now be achieved only by reversal
of the means to which early liberalism was committed.
Organized social planning, put into effect for the crea-

SOCIAL ACTION 55

lion of an order in which industry and finance are
socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide
I he material basis for the cultural liberation and growth
<>( individuals, is now the sole method of social action
by which liberalism can realize its professed aims. Such
planning demands in turn a new conception and logic of
freed intelligence as a social force. To these phases of a
renascent liberalism, I turn in the chapter that follows.

* III *

renascent liberalism

Nothing is blinder than the supposition that we live
in a society and world so static that either nothing new
will happen or else it will happen because of the use ol
violence. Social change is here as a fact, a fact having
multifarious forms and marked in intensity. Changes
that are revolutionary in effect are in process in every
phase of life. Transformations in the family, the church,
the school, in science and art, in economic and political
relations, are occurring so swiftly that imagination is
'baffled in attempt to lay hold of them. Flux does not
have to be created. But it does have to be directed. It
has to be so controlled that it will move to some end m
accordance with the principles of life, since life itself is
development. Liberalism is committed to an end that is
l at once enduring and flexible: the liberation of indi-
viduals so that realization of their capacities may e
' the law of their life. It is committed to the use of freed
intelligence as the method of directing change. In any
case, civilization is faced with the problem of muting
the changes that are going on into a coherent pattern o

social organization. The liberal spirit is marked by its

56

SOCIAL ACTION 57

own picture of the pattern that is required: a social
organization that will make possible effective liberty
and opportunity for personal growth in mind and spirit
in all individuals. Its present need is recognition that
established material security is a prerequisite of the
ends which it cherishes, so that, the basis of life being
secure, individuals may actively share in the wealth of
cultural resources that now exist and may contribute,
each in his own way, to their further enrichment.

The fact of change has been so continual and so
intense that it overwhelms our minds. We are bewildered
by the spectacle of its rapidity, scope and intensity.
It is not surprising that men have protected themselves
from the impact of such vast change by resorting to
what psycho-analysis has taught us to call rationaliza-
tions, in other words, protective fantasies. The Victorian
idea that change is a part of an evolution that neces-
sarily leads through successive stages to some preor-
dained divine far-off event is one rationalization. The
conception of a sudden, complete, almost catastrophic,
transformation, to be brought about by the victory of
the proletariat over the class now dominant, is a similar
rationalization. But men have met the impact of change
in the realm of actuality, mostly by drift and by tem-
porary, usually incoherent, improvisations. Liberalism,
like every other theory of life, has suffered from the
state of confused uncertainty that is the lot of a world
suffering from rapid and varied change for which there
is no intellectual and moral preparation.

Because of this lack of mental and moral prepara-

58 LIBERALISM AND

tion the impact of swiftly moving changes produced, as I
have just said, confusion, uncertainty and drift. Chang * 1
in patterns of belief, desire and purpose has lagged
behind the modification of the external conditions under
which men associate. Industrial habits have changed
most rapidly; there has followed at considerable dis-
tance, change in political relations; alterations in leg;il
relations and methods have lagged even more, while
changes in the institutions that deal most directly willi
patterns of thought and belief have taken place to
the least extent. This fact defines the primary, though
not by any means the ultimate, responsibility of a
liberalism that intends to be a vital force. Its work is
first of all education, in the broadest sense of that term.
Schooling is a part of the work of education, but educa-
tion in its full meaning includes all the influences that
go to form the attitudes and dispositions (of desire as
well as of belief), which constitute dominant habits of
mind and character.

Let me mention three changes that have taken place
in one of the institutions in which immense shifts have
occurred, but that are still relatively external — external
in the sense that the pattern of intelligent purpose and
emotion has not been correspondingly modified. Civiliza-
tion existed for most of human history in a state of
scarcity in the material basis for a humane life. Our
ways of thinking, planning and working have been
attuned to this fact. Thanks to science and technology
we now live in an age of potential plenty. The imme-
diate effect of the emergence of the new possibility was

SOCIAL ACTION 59

simply to stimulate, to a point of incredible exaggera-
tion, the striving for the material resources, called
wealth, opened to men in the new vista. It is a charac-
teristic of all development, physiological and mental,
that when a new force and factor appears, it is first
pushed to an extreme. Only when its possibilities have
been exhausted (at least relatively) does it take its
place in the life perspective. The economic-material
phase of life, which belongs in the basal ganglia of
society, has usurped for more than a century the cortex
of the social body. The habits of desire and effort that
were bred in the age of scarcity do not readily subor-
dinate themselves and take the place of the matter-of-
course routine that becomes appropriate to them when
machines and impersonal power have the capacity to
liberate man from bondage to the strivings that were
once needed to make secure his physical basis. Even
now when there is a vision of an age of abundance and
when the vision is supported by hard fact, it is material
security as an end that appeals to most rather than the
way of living which this security makes possible. Men’s
minds are still pathetically held in the clutch of old
habits and haunted by old memories.

For, in the second place, insecurity is the natural - 1
child and the foster child, too, of scarcity., Early liber-
alism emphasized the importance of insecurity as a
fundamentally necessary economic motive, holding that
without this goad men would not work, abstain or
accumulate. Formulation of this conception was new.
But the fact that was formulated was nothing new. It

LIBERALISM AND

60

was deeply rooted in the habits that were formed in I In-
long struggle against material scarcity. The system llial
goes by the name of capitalism is a systematic mani-
festation of desires and purposes built up in an age of
ever threatening want and now carried over into a time
of ever increasing potential plenty. The conditions ilia!
generate insecurity for the many no longer spring from
nature. They are found in institutions and arrangement
that are within deliberate human control. Surely this
change marks one of the greatest revolutions that lias
taken place in all human history. Because of it, in-
security is not now the motive to work and sacrifice buL
to despair. It is not an instigation to put forth energy
but to an impotency that can be converted from deatli
into endurance only by charity. But the habits of mind
and action that modify institutions to make potential
abundance an actuality are still so inchoate that most
of us discuss labels like individualism, socialism and
* communism instead of even perceiving the possibility,
much less the necessity for realizing what can and
should be.

In the third place, the patterns of belief and purpose
that still dominate economic institutions were formed
when individuals produced with their hands, alone or
in small groups. The notion that society in general is
served by the unplanned coincidence of the consequences
of a vast multitude of efforts put forth by isolated indi-
viduals without reference to any social end, was also
something new as a formulation. But it also formulated
the working principle of an epoch which the advent of

SOCIAL ACTION 61

new forces of production was to bring to an end. It
demands no great power of intelligence to see that under
present conditions the isolated individual is well-nigh
helpless. Concentration and corporate organization are
the rule. But the concentration and corporate organiza-
tion are still controlled in their operation by ideas
that were institutionalized in eons of separate individual
effort. The attempts at cooperation for mutual benefit
that are put forth are precious as experimental moves.
But that society itself should see to it that a cooperative
industrial order be instituted, one that is consonant with
the realities of production enforced by an era of ma-
chinery and power, is so novel an idea to the general
mind that its mere suggestion is hailed with abusive
epithets — sometimes with imprisonment.

When, then, I say that the first object of a renascent
liberalism is education, I mean that its task is to aid in
producing the habits of mind and character, the intellec-
tual and moral patterns, that are somewhere near even
with the actual movements of events. It is, I repeat,
the split between the latter as they have externally
occurred and the ways of desiring, thinking, and of
putting emotion and purpose into execution that is the
basic cause of present confusion in mind and paralysis
in action. The educational task cannot be accomplished
merely by working upon men’s minds, without action
that effects actual change in institutions. The idea that
dispositions and attitudes can be altered by merely
“moral” means conceived of as something that goes on
wholly inside of persons is itself one of the old patterns

62 liberalism and

that has to be changed. Thought, desire and purpose
exist in a constant give and take of interaction with
environing conditions. But resolute thought is the first
step in that change of action that will itself carry
further the needed change in patterns of mind and
character.

In short, liberalism must now become radical, mean-
ing by bl radical” perception of the necessity of thorough-
going changes in the set-up of institutions and corre-
sponding activity to bring the changes to pass. For die
gulf between what the actual situation makes possible
and the actual state itself is so great that it cannot be
bridged by piecemeal policies undertaken ad hoc . The
process of producing the changes will be, in any case, a
gradual one. But reforms 59 that deal now with this
abuse and now with that without having a social goal
based upon an inclusive plan, differ entirely from effort
at re-forming, in its literal sense, the institutional
scheme of things. The liberals of more than a century
ago were denounced in their time as subversive radicals,
and only when the new economic order was established
did they become apologists for the status quo or else
content with social patchwork. If radicalism be defined
as perception of need for radical change, then today any
liberalism which is not also radicalism is irrelevant and
doomed.

But radicalism also means, in the minds of many,
bo tli supporters and opponents, dependence upon use
of violence as die main method of effecting drastic
changes. 1 1 ere the liberal parts company. For he is com-

SOCIAL ACTION 63

mitted to the organization of intelligent action as the
chief method. Any frank discussion of the issue must
recognize the extent to which those who decry the use
of any violence are themselves willing to resort to
violence and are ready to put their will into operation.
Their fundamental objection is to change in the eco-
nomic institution that now exists, and for its main-
tenance they resort to the use of the force that is placed
in their hands by this very institution. They do not need
to advocate the use of force; their only need is to em-
ploy it. Force, rather than intelligence, is built into the
procedures of the existing social system, regularly as
coercion, in times of crisis as overt violence. The legal
system, conspicuously in its penal aspect, more subtly
in civil practice, rests upon coercion. Wars are the
methods recurrently used in settlement of disputes be-
tween nations. One school of radicals dwells upon the
fact that in the past the transfer of power in one society
has either been accomplished by or attended with vio-
lence. But what we need to realize is that physical force
is used, at least in the form of coercion, in the very set-up
of our society. That the competitive system, which was
thought of by early liberals as the means by which the
latent abilities of individuals were to be evoked and
directed into socially useful channels, is now in fact a
state of scarcely disguised battle hardly needs to be
dwelt upon. That the control of the means of produc-
tion by the few in legal possession operates as a stand-
ing agency of coercion of the many, may need emphasis
in statement, but is surely evident to one who is willing

64 LIBERALISM AND

to observe and honestly report the existing scene. It is
foolish to regard the political state as the only agency
now endowed with coercive power. Its exercise of this
power is pale in contrast with that exercised by concen-
trated and organized property interests.

It is not surprising in view of our standing depend-
ence upon the use of coercive force that at every time
of crisis coercion breaks out into open violence. In this
country, with its tradition of violence fostered by fron-
tier conditions and by the conditions under which im-
migration went on during the greater part of our
history, resort to violence is especially recurrent on the
part of those who are in power. In times of imminent
change, our verbal and sentimental worship of the Con-
stitution, with its guarantees of civil liberties of ex-
pression, publication and assemblage, readily goes
overboard. Often the officials of the law are the worst
offenders, acting as agents of some power that rules the
economic life of a community. What is said about the
value of free speech as a safety valve is then forgotten
with the utmost of ease: a comment, perhaps, upon the
weakness of the defense of freedom of expression that
values it simply as a means of blowing-off steam.

It is not pleasant to face the extent to which, as mat-
ter of fact, coercive and violent force is relied upon in
the present social system as a means of social control.
It is much more agreeable to evade the fact. But unless
the fact is acknowledged as a fact in its full depth and
breadth, the meaning of dependence upon intelligence
as the alternative method of social direction will not be

SOCIAL ACTION 65

grasped. Failure in acknowledgment signifies, among
other things, failure to realize that those who propa-
gate the dogma of dependence upon force have the
sanction of much that is already entrenched in the ex-
isting system. They would hut turn the use of it to
opposite ends. The assumption that the method of intel-
ligence already rules and that those who urge the use
of violence are introducing a new element into the social
picture may not he hypocritical but it is unintelligently
unaware of what is actually involved in intelligence as
an alternative method of social action.

I begin with an example of what is really involved in
the issue. Why is it, apart from our tradition of violence,
that liberty of expression is tolerated and even lauded
when social affairs seem to be going in a quiet fashion,
and yet is so readily destroyed whenever matters grow
critical? The general answer, of course, is that at bot-
tom social institutions have habituated us to the use of
force in some veiled form. But a part of the answer is
found in our ingrained habit of regarding intelligence
as an individual possession and its exercise as an indi-
vidual right. It is false that freedom of inquiry and of
expression are not modes of action. They are exceed-
ingly potent modes of action. The reactionary grasps
this fact, in practice if not in express idea, more quickly
than the liberal, who is too much given to holding that
this freedom is innocent of consequences, as well as
being a merely individual right. The result is that this
liberty is tolerated as long as it does not seem to menace
in any way the status quo of society. When it does.

66 LIBERALISM AND

every effort is put forth to identify the established order
with the public good. When this identification is estab-
lished, it follows that any merely individual right musl
i yield to the general welfare. As long as freedom of
thought and speech is claimed as a merely individual
right, it will give way, as do other merely personal
claims, when it is, or is successfully represented to be,
in opposition to the general welfare.

I would not in the least disparage the noble fight
waged by early liberals in behalf of individual freedom
of thought and expression. We owe more to them than
it is possible to record in words. No more eloquent
words have ever come from any one than those of Jus-
tice Brandeis in the case of a legislative act that in fact
restrained freedom of political expression. He said :
“Those who won our independence believed that the
final end of the State was to make men free to develop
their faculties, and that in its government the delibera-
tive faculties should prevail over the arbitrary. They
valued liberty both as an end and as a means. They
believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and cour-
age to be the secret of liberty. They believed that free-
dom to think as you will and to speak as you think are
means indispensable to the discovery and spread of
political truth; that without free speech and assembly
discussion would be futile; that with them, discussion
affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dis-
semination of noxious doctrines; that the greatest men-
ace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion
is a political duty; and that this should be a funda-

SOCIAL ACTION 67

mental principle of the American government.” This is
the creed of a fighting liberalism. But the issue I am
raising is connected with the fact that these words are
found in a dissenting, a minority opinion of the Supreme
Court of the United States. The public function of free
individual thought and speech is clearly recognized in
the words quoted. But the reception of the truth of the
words is met by an obstacle: the old habit of defending
liberty of thought and expression as something inhering
in individuals apart from and even in opposition to
social claims.

Liberalism has to assume the responsibility for mak-
ing it clear that intelligence is a social asset and is
clothed with a function as public as is its origin, in the
concrete, in social cooperation. It was Comte who, in
reaction against the purely individualistic ideas that
seemed to him to underlie the French Revolution, said
that in mathematics, physics and astronomy there is no
right of private conscience. If we remove the statement
from the context of actual scientific procedure, it is
dangerous because it is false. The individual inquirer
has not only the right but the duty to criticize the ideas,
theories and “laws” that are current in science. But if
we take the statement in the context of scientific method,
it indicates that he carries on this criticism in virtue of
a socially generated body of knowledge and by means
of methods that are not of private origin and possession.
He uses a method that retains public validity even when
innovations are introduced in its use and application.

Henry George, speaking of ships that ply the ocean

#

63 LIBERALISM AND

with a velocity of five or six hundred miles a day, re-
marked, “There is nothing whatever to show that the
men who today build and navigate and use such ships
are one whit superior in any physical or mental quality
to their ancestors, whose best vessel was a coracle of
wicker and hide. The enormous improvement which these;
ships show is not an improvement of human nature; it
is an improvement of society — it is due to a wider and
fuller union of individual efforts in accomplishment of
common ends.” This single instance, duly pondered,
gives a better idea of the nature of intelligence and its
social office than would a volume of abstract disserta-
tion. Consider merely two of the factors that enter in
and their social consequences. Consider what is involved
in the production of steel, from the first use of fire and
then the crude smelting of ore, to the processes that now
effect the mass production of steel. Consider also the
development of the power of guiding ships across track-
less wastes from the day when they hugged the shore,
steering by visible sun and stars, to the appliances that
now enable a sure course to be taken. It would require
a heavy tome to describe the advances in science, in
mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, that have
made these two things possible. The record would be an
account of a vast multitude of cooperative efforts, in
which one individual uses the results provided for him
by a countless number of other individuals, and uses
them so as to add to the common and public store. A
survey of such facts brings home the actual social char-
acter of intelligence as it actually develops and majies

SOCIAL ACTION 69

its way. Survey of the consequences upon the ways of
living of individuals and upon the terms on which men
associate together, due to the new method of transporta-
tion would take us to the wheat farmer of the prairies,
the cattle raiser of the plains, the cotton grower of the
South; into a multitude of mills and factories, and to the
counting-room of banks, and what would be seen in this
country would be repeated in every country of the
globe.

It is to such things as these, rather than to abstract
and formal psychology that we must go if we would
learn the nature of intelligence: in itself, in its ori-
gin and development, and its uses and consequences.
At this point, I should like to recur to an idea put for-
ward in the preceding chapter. I then referred to the
contempt often expressed for reliance upon intelligence
as a social method, and I said this scorn is due to the
identification of intelligence with native endowments of
individuals. In contrast to this notion, I spoke of the
power of individuals to appropriate and respond to the
intelligence, the knowledge, ideas and purposes that
have been integrated in the medium in which individuals
live. Each of us knows, for example, some mechanic of
ordinary native capacity who is intelligent within the
matters of his calling. He has lived in an environment
in which the cumulative intelligence of a multitude of
cooperating individuals is embodied, and by the use of
his native capacities he makes some phase of this
intelligence his own. Given a social medium in whose
institutions the available knowledge, ideas and art of

70 LIBERALISM AND

humanity were incarnate, and the average individual
would rise to undreamed heights of social and political
intelligence.

The rub, the problem is found in the proviso. Can the
intelligence actually existent and potentially available
be embodied in that institutional medium in which an
individual thinks, desires and acts? Before dealing di-
rectly with this question, I wish to say something abouL
the operation of intelligence in our present politica I
institutions, as exemplified by current practices of demo-
cratic government. I would not minimize the advance
scored in substitution of methods of discussion and
conference for the method of arbitrary rule. But the
better is too often the enemy of the still better. Discus-
sion, as the manifestation of intelligence in political
life, stimulates publicity; by its means sore spots are
brought to light that would otherwise remain hidden.
It affords opportunity for promulgation of new ideas.
Compared with despotic rule, it is an invitation to indi-
viduals to concern themselves with public affairs. But
discussion and dialectic, however indispensable they are
to the elaboration of ideas and policies after ideas
are once put forth, are weak reeds to depend upon for
systematic origination of comprehensive plans, the plans
that are required if the problem of social organization
is to be met. There was a time when discussion, the
comparison of ideas already current so as to purify and
clarify them, was thought to be sufficient in discovery
of the structure and laws of physical nature. In the lat-
ter field, the method was displaced by that of experi-

SOCIAL ACTION 71

mental observation guided by comprehensive working
hypotheses, and using all the resources made available
by mathematics.

But we still depend upon the method of discussion,
with only incidental scientific control, in politics. Our
system of popular suffrage, immensely valuable as it is
in comparison with what preceded it, exhibits the idea
that intelligence is an individualistic possession, at best
enlarged by public discussion. Existing political practice,
with its complete ignoring of occupational groups and
the organized knowledge and purposes that are involved
in the existence of such groups, manifests a dependence
upon a summation of individuals quantitatively, similar
to Bentham’s purely quantitative formula of the greatest
sum of pleasures of the greatest possible number. The
formation of parties or, as the eighteenth-century writers
called them, factions, and the system of party govern-
ment is the practically necessary counterweight to a nu-
merical and atomistic individualism. The idea that the
conflict of parties will, by means of public discussion,
bring out necessary public truths is a kind of political
watered-down version of the Hegelian dialectic, with
its synthesis arrived at by a union of antithetical con-
ceptions. The method has nothing in common with the
procedure of organized cooperative inquiry which has
won the triumphs of science in the field of physical
nature.

Intelligence in politics when it is identified with dis-
cussion means reliance upon symbols. The invention of
language is probably the greatest single invention

72 LIBERALISM AND

achieved by humanity. The development of political
forms that promote the use of symbols in place of arbi-
trary power was another great invention. The nineteenth-
century establishment of parliamentary institutions,
written constitutions and the suffrage as means of politi-
cal rule, is a tribute to the power of symbols. But sym-
bols are significant only in connection with realities
behind them. No intelligent observer can deny, I think,
that they are often used in party politics as a substitute
for realities instead of as means of contact with them.
Popular literacy, in connection with the telegraph, cheap
postage and the printing press, has enormously multi-
plied the number of those influenced. That which we
term education has done a good deal to generate habits
that put symbols in the place of realities. The forms of
popular government make necessary the elaborate use
of words to influence political action. “Propaganda” is
the inevitable consequence of the combination of these
influences and it extends to every area of life. Words
not only take the place of realities but are themselves
debauched. Decline in the prestige of suffrage and of
parliamentary government are intimately associated
with the belief, manifest in practice even if not ex-
pressed in words, that intelligence is an individual pos-
session to be reached by means of verbal persuasion.

This fact suggests, by way of contrast, the genuine
meaning of intelligence in connection with public opin-
ion, sentiment and action. The crisis in democracy de-
mands the substitution of the intelligence that is
exemplified in scientific procedure for the kind of intel-

SOCIAL ACTION 73

ligence that is now accepted. The need for this change
is not exhausted in the demand for greater honesty and
impartiality, even though these qualities be now cor-
rupted by discussion carried on mainly for purposes of
party supremacy and for imposition of some special but
concealed interest. These qualities need to be restored.
But the need goes further. The social use of intelligence
would remain deficient even if these moral traits were
exalted, and yet intelligence continued to be identified
simply with discussion and persuasion, necessary as are
these things/ Approximation to use of scientific method
in investigation and of the engineering mind in the
invention and projection of far-reaching social plans is
demanded. The habit of considering social realities in
terms of cause and effect and social policies in terms of
means and consequences is still inchoate. The contrast
between the state of intelligence in politics and in the
physical control of nature is to be taken literally. What
has happened in this latter is the outstanding demon-
stration of the meaning of organized intelligence. The
combined effect of science and technology has released
more productive energies in a bare hundred years than
stands to the credit of prior human history in its en-
tirety. Productively it has multiplied nine million times
in the last generation alone. The prophetic vision of
Francis Bacon of subjugation of the energies of nature
through change in methods of inquiry has well-nigh been
realized. The stationary engine, the locomotive, the dy-
namo, the motor car, turbine, telegraph, telephone, radio
and moving picture are not the products of either iso-

74 LIBERALISM AND

lated individual minds nor of the particular economic
regime called capitalism. They are the fruit of methods
that first penetrated to the working causalities of nature
and then utilized the resulting knowledge in bold imagi-
native ventures of invention and construction.

We hear a great deal in these days about class con-
flict. The past history of man is held up to us as almost
exclusively a record of struggles between classes, ending
in the victory of a class that had been oppressed and
the transfer of power to it. It is difficult to avoid reading
the past in terms of the contemporary scene. Indeed,
fundamentally it is impossible to avoid this course. With
a certain proviso, it is highly important that we are
compelled to follow this path. For the past as past is
gone, save for esthetic enjoyment and refreshment, while
the present is with us. Knowledge of the past is sig-
nificant only as it deepens and extends our understand-
ing of the present. Yet there is a proviso. We must grasp
the things that are most important in the present when
we turn to the past and not allow ourselves to be misled
by secondary phenomena no matter how intense and
immediately urgent they are. Viewed from this stand-
point, the rise of scientific method and of technology
based upon it is the genuinely active force in producing
the vast complex of changes the world is now under-
going, not the class struggle whose spirit and method
are opposed to science. If we lay hold upon the causal
force exercised by this embodiment of intelligence we
shall know where to turn for the means of directing
further change.

SOCIAL ACTION 75

When I say that scientific method and technology
have been the active force in producing the revolutionary
transformations society is undergoing, I do not imply
no other forces have been at work to arrest, deflect and
corrupt their operation. Rather this fact is positively im-
plied. At this point, indeed, is located the conflict that
underlies the confusions and uncertainties of the pres-
ent scene. The conflict is between institutions and habits
originating in the pre-scientific and pre-technological
age and the new forces generated by science and tech-
nology. The application of science, to a considerable
degree, even its own growth, has been conditioned by
the system to which the name of capitalism is given, a
rough designation of a complex of political and legal
arrangements centering about a particular mode of eco-
nomic relations. Because of the conditioning of science
and technology by this setting, the second and humanly
most important part of Bacon’s prediction has so far
largely missed realization. The conquest of natural ener-
gies has not accrued to the betterment of the common
human estate in anything like the degree he anticipated.

Because of conditions that were set by the legal insti-
tutions and the moral ideas existing when the scientific
and industrial revolutions came into being, the chief
usufruct of the latter has been appropriated by a rela-
tively small class. Industrial entrepreneurs have reaped
out of all proportion to what they sowed. By obtaining
private ownership of the means of production and ex-
change they deflected a considerable share of the
results of increased productivity to their private pockets.

LIBERALISM AND

76

This appropriation was not the fruit of criminal con-
spiracy or of sinister intent. It was sanctioned not only
by legal institutions of age-long standing but by the
entire prevailing moral code. The institution of private
property long antedated feudal times. It is the institu-
tion with which men have lived, with few exceptions,
since the dawn of civilization. Its existence has deeply
impressed itself upon mankind’s moral conceptions.
Moreover, the new industrial forces tended to break
down many of the rigid class barriers that had been in
force, and to give to millions a new outlook and inspire
a new hope; — especially in this country with no feudal
background and no fixed class system.

Since the legal institutions and the patterns of mind
characteristic of ages of civilization still endure, there
exists the conflict that brings confusion into every phase
of present life. The problem of bringing into being a
new social orientation and organization is, when reduced
to its ultimates, the problem of using the new resources
of production, made possible by the advance of physical
science, for social ends, for what Bentham called the great-
est good of the greatest number. Institutional relation-
ships fixed in the pre-scientific age stand in the way of
accomplishing this great transformation. Lag in mental
and moral patterns provides the bulwark of the older
institutions; in expressing the past they still express
present beliefs, outlooks and purposes. Here is the place
where the problem of liberalism centers today.

The argument drawn from past history that radical
change must be effected by means of class struggle, cul-

SOCIAL ACTION 77

minating in open war, fails to discriminate between the
two forces, one active, the other resistant and deflecting,
that have produced the social scene in which we live.
The active force is, as I have said, scientific method and
technological application. The opposite force is that of *
older institutions and the habits that have grown up
around them. Instead of discrimination between forces
and distribution of their consequences, we find the two
things lumped together. The compound is labeled the
capitalistic or the bourgeois class, and to this class as a
class is imputed all the important features of present
industrialized society — much as the defenders of the
regime of economic liberty exercised for private prop-
erty are accustomed to attribute every improvement made
in the last century and a half to the same capitalistic
regime. Thus in orthodox communist literature, from
the Communist Manifesto of 1848 to the present day,
we are told that the bourgeoisie, the name for a dis-
tinctive class, has done this and that. It has, so it is said,
given a cosmopolitan character to production and con-
sumption; has destroyed the national basis of industry;
has agglomerated population in urban centers ; has trans-
ferred power from the country to the city, in the process
of creating colossal productive force, its chief achieve-
ment. In addition, it has created crises of ever renewed
intensity; has created imperialism of a new type in
frantic effort to control raw materials and markets.
Finally, it has created a new class, the proletariat, and
has created it as a class having a common interest op-
posed to that of the bourgeoisie, and is giving an irre-

78 LIBERALISM AND

sistible stimulus to its organization, first as a class and
then as a political power. According to the economic
version of the Hegelian dialectic, the bourgeois class is
thus creating its own complete and polar opposite, and
this in time will end the old power and rule. The class
struggle of veiled civil war will finally burst into open
revolution and the result will be either the common ruin
of the contending parties or a revolutionary reconstitu-
tion of society at large through a transfer of power
from one class to another.

The position thus sketched unites vast sweep with
great simplicity. I am concerned with it here only as far
as it emphasizes the idea of a struggle between classes,
culminating in open and violent warfare as being the
method for production of radical social change. For, be
it noted, the issue is not whether some amount of violence
will accompany the effectuation of radical change of
institutions. The question is whether force or intelligence
is to be the method upon which we consistently rely and
to whose promotion we devote our energies. Insistence
that the use of violent force is inevitable limits the use
of available intelligence, for wherever the inevitable
reigns intelligence cannot be used. Commitment to inevi-
tability is always the fruit of dogma; intelligence does
not pretend to know save as a result of experimentation,
the opposite of preconceived dogma. Moreover, accept-
ance in advance of the inevitability of violence tends to
produce the use of violence in cases where peaceful
methods might otherwise avail. The curious fact is that
while it is generally admitted that this and that particu-

SOCIAL ACTION 79

lar social problem, say of the family, or railroads or
banking, must be solved, if at all, by the method of
intelligence, yet there is supposed to be some one all-
inclusive social problem which can be solved only by the
use of violence. This fact would be inexplicable were it
not a conclusion from dogma as its premise.

It is frequently asserted that the method of experi-
mental intelligence can be applied to physical facts be-
cause physical nature does not present conflicts of class
interests, while it is inapplicable to society because the
latter is so deeply marked by incompatible interests.
It is then assumed that the “experimentalist” is one who
has chosen to ignore the uncomfortable fact of conflicting
interests. Of course, there are conflicting interests; other-
wise there would be no social problems. The problem
under discussion is precisely how conflicting claims
are to be settled in the interest of the widest pos-
sible contribution to the interests of all — or at least of
the great majority. The method of democracy — inas-
far as it is that of organized intelligence — is to bring
these conflicts out into the open where their special claims
can be seen and appraised, where they can be discxissed
and judged in the light of more inclusive interests than
are represented by either of them separately. There is,
for example, a clash of interests between munition manu-
facturers and most of the rest of the population. The more
the respective claims of the two are publicly and scien-
tifically weighed, the more likely it is that the public in-
terest will be disclosed and be made effective. There is an
undoubted objective clash of interests between finance-

LIBERALISM AND

80

capitalism that controls the means of production and
whose profit is served by maintaining relative scarcity,
and idle workers and hungry consumers. But what gen-
erates violent strife is failure to bring the conflict into
the light of intelligence where the conflicting interests
can be adjudicated in behalf of the interest of the great
majority. Those most committed to the dogma of inevi-
table force recognize the need for intelligently discover-
ing and expressing the dominant social interest up to a
certain point and then draw back. The “experimentalist”
is one who would see to it that the method depended
upon by all in some degree in every democratic com-
munity be followed through to completion.

In spite of the existence of class conflicts, amounting
at times to veiled civil war, any one habituated to the
use of the method of science will view with considerable
suspicion the erection of actual human beings into fixed
entities called classes, having no overlapping interests
and so internally unified and externally separated that
they are made the protagonists of history — itself hypo-
thetical. Such an idea of classes is a survival of a rigid
logic that once prevailed in the sciences of nature, but
that no longer has any place there. This conversion of
abstractions into entities smells more of a dialectic of
concepts than of a realistic examination of facts, even
though it makes more of an emotional appeal to many
than do the results of the latter. To say that all past
historic social progress has been the result of coopera-
tion and not of conflict would be also an exaggeration.
But exaggeration against exaggeration, it is the more

SOCIAL ACTION 81

reasonable of the two. And it is no exaggeration to say
that the measure of civilization is the degree in which the
method of cooperative intelligence replaces the method
of brute conflict.

But the point I am especially concerned with just
here is the indiscriminate lumping together as a single
force of two different things — the results of scientific
technology and of a legal system of property relations.
It is science and technology that have had the revolu-
tionary social effect while the legal system has been the
relatively static element. According to the Marxians
themselves, the economic foundations of society consist
of two things, the forces of production on one side and,
on the other side, the social relations of production, that
is, the legal property system under which the former
operates. The latter lags behind, and “revolutions” are
produced by the power of the forces of production to
change the system of institutional relations. But what
are the modern forces of production save those of sci-
entific technology? And what is scientific technology
save a large-scale demonstration of organized intelli-
gence in action?

It is quite true that what is happening socially is the
result of the combination of the two factors, one dy-
namic, the other relatively static. If we choose to call
the combination by the name of capitalism, then it is
true, or a truism, that capitalism is the “cause” of all
the important social changes that have occurred an
argument that the representatives of capitalism are eager
to put forward whenever the increase of productivity is

82 LIBERALISM AND

in question. But if we want to understand , and not jusL
to paste labels, unfavorable or favorable as the case may
be, we shall certainly begin and end with discrimina-
tion. Colossal increase in productivity, the bringing of
men together in cities and large factories, the elimina-
tion of distance, the accumulation of capital, fixed and
liquid — these things would have come about, at a cer-
tain stage, no matter what the established institutional
system. They are the consequence of the new means of
, technological production. Certain other things have hap-
pened because of inherited institutions and the habits
of belief and character that accompany and suppoil
them. If we begin at this point, we shall see that the
release of productivity is the product of cooperatively
organized intelligence, and shall also see that the institu-
tional framework is precisely that which is not subjected
as yet, in any considerable measure, to the impact of
inventive and constructive intelligence. That coercion
and oppression on a large scale exist, no honest person
can deny. But these things are not the product of science
, and technology but of the perpetuation of old institu-
tions and patterns untouched by scientific method. The
inference to be drawn is clear.

The argument, drawn from history, that great social
changes have been effected only by violent means, needs
considerable qualification, in view of the vast scope of
changes that are taking place without the use of violence.
But even if it be admitted to hold of the past, the con-
clusion that violence is the method now to be depended
upon does net follow — unless one is committed to a

SOCIAL ACTION 83

dogmatic philosophy of history. The radical who insists
that the future method of change must be like that of the
past has much in common with the hide-bound reac-
tionary who holds to the past as an ultimate fact. Both
overlook the fact that history in being a process of
change generates change not only in details but also in
the method of directing social change . I recur to what I
said at the beginning of this chapter. It is true that the
social order is largely conditioned by the use of coercive
force, bursting at times into open violence. But what is
also true is that mankind now has in its possession a
new method, that of cooperative and experimental sci-
ence which expresses the method of intelligence. I should
be meeting dogmatism with dogmatism if I asserted that
the existence of this historically new factor completely
invalidates all arguments drawn from the effect of force
in the past. But it is within the bounds of reason to as-
sert that the presence of this social factor demands that
the present situation be analyzed on its own terms, and
not be rigidly subsumed under fixed conceptions drawn
from the past.

Any analysis made in terms of the present situation
will not fail to note one fact that militates powerfully
against arguments drawn from past use of violence.
Modern warfare is destructive beyond anything known
in older times. This increased destructiveness is due
primarily, of course, to the fact that science has raised
to a new pitch of destructive power all the agencies of
armed hostility. But it is also due to the much greater
interdependence of all the elements of society. The

84 LIBERALISM AND

bonds that hold modern communities and states together
are as delicate as they are numerous. The self-sufficiency
and independence of a local community, characteristic
of more primitive societies, have disappeared in every
highly industrialized country. The gulf that once sepa-
rated the civilian population from the military has vir-
tually gone. War involves paralysis of all normal social
activities, and not merely the meeting of armed forces
in the field. The Communist Manifesto presented two
alternatives: either the revolutionary change and trans-
fer of power to the proletariat, or the common ruin of the
contending parties. Today, the civil war that would be
adequate to effect transfer of power and a reconstitu-
tion of society at large, as understood by official Com-
munists, would seem to present but one possible
consequence: the ruin of all parties and the destruction
of civilized life. This fact alone is enough to lead us to
consider the potentialities of the method of intelligence.

The argument for putting chief dependence upon
violence as the method of effecting radical change is,
moreover, usually put in a way that proves altogether
too much for its own case. It is said that the dominant
economic class has all the agencies of power in its hands,
directly the army, militia and police; indirectly, the
courts, schools, press and radio. I shall not stop to an-
alyze this statement. But if one admits it to be valid, the
conclusion to be drawn is surely the folly of resorting
to a use of force against force that is so well intrenched.
The positive conclusion that emerges is that conditions
that would promise success in the case of use of force

SOCIAL ACTION 85

are such as to make possible great change without any
great recourse to such a method.*

Those who uphold the necessity of dependence upon
violence usually much oversimplify the case by setting
up a disjunction they regard as self-evident. They say
that the sole alternative is putting our trust in parlia-
mentary procedures as they now exist. This isolation of
law-making from other social forces and agencies that
are constantly operative is wholly unrealistic. Legisla-
tures and congresses do not exist in a vacuum — not even
the judges on the bench live in completely secluded
sound-proof chambers. The assumption that it is pos-
sible for the constitution and activities of law-making
bodies to persist unchanged while society itself is under-
going great change is an exercise in verbal formal logic.

It is true that in this country, because of the interpre-
tations made by courts of a written constitution, our
political institutions are unusually inflexible. It is also
true, as well as even more important (because it is a
factor in causing this rigidity) that our institutions,
democratic in form, tend to favor in substance a priv-
ileged plutocracy. Nevertheless, it is sheer defeatism to
assume in advance of actual trial that democratic politi-
cal institutions are incapable either of further develop-
ment or of constructive social application. Even as they
now exist, the forms of representative government are

* It should be noted that Marx himself was not completely committed
to the dogma of the inevitability of force as the means of effecting
revolutionary changes in the system of “social relations.” For at one
^ time he contemplated that the change might occur in Great Britain and
(J ) the United States, and possibly in Holland, by peaceful means.

86 LIBERALISM AND

potentially capable of expressing the public will when
that assumes anything like unification. Anil them is
nothing inherent in them that forbids their supplementa-
tion by political agencies that represent definitely eco-
nomic social interests, like those of producers and
consumers*

The final argument in behalf of the use of intelli-
gence is that as are the means used so are the actual ends
achieved — that is, the consequences. I know of no greater
fallacy than the claim of those who hold to the dogma of
the necessity of brute force that this use will be the
method of calling genuine democracy into existence—
of which they profess themselves the simon-pure ad-
herents. It requires an unusually credulous faith in the
Hegelian dialectic of opposites to think that all of a
sudden the use of force by a class will he transmuted
into a democratic classless society. Force breeds counter-
force; the Newtonian law of action and reaction still
holds in physics, and violence is physical. To profess
democracy as an ultimate ideal and the suppression oi
democracy as a means to the ideal may be possible
in a country that has never known even rudimentary
democracy, hut when professed in a country that has
anything of a genuine democratic spirit in its tradi-
tions, it signifies desire for possession and retention of
power by a class, whether that class be called Fascist
or Proletarian. In the light of what happens in non-
democratic countries, it is pertinent to ask whether die
rule of a class signifies the dictatorship of the majority,
or dictatorship over the chosen class by a minority party ;

SOCIAL ACTION 87

whether dissenters are allowed even within the class the
party claims to represent; and whether the development
of literature and the other arts proceeds according to a
formula prescribed by a party in conformity with a
doctrinaire dogma of history and of infallible leader-
ship, or whether artists are free from regimentation?
Until these questions are satisfactorily answered, it is
permissible to look with considerable suspicion upon
those who assert that suppression of democracy is the
road to the adequate establishment of genuine democ-
racy. The one exception — and that apparent rather than
real — to dependence upon organized intelligence as the
method for directing social change is found when so-
ciety through an authorized majority has entered upon
the path of social experimentation leading to great social
change, and a minority refuses by force to permit the
method of intelligent action to go into effect. Then force
may be intelligently employed to subdue and disarm the
recalcitrant minority.

There may he some who think I am unduly dignify-
ing a position held by a comparatively small group by
taking their arguments as seriously as I have done. But
their position serves to bring into strong relief the alter-
natives before us. It makes clear the meaning of renas-
cent liberalism. The alternatives are continuation of drift
with attendant improvisations to meet special emer-
gencies; dependence upon violence; dependence upon
socially organized intelligence. The first two aherna*
tives, however, are not mutually exclusive, for if things
are allowed to drift the result may be some sort of social

83 LIBERALISM AND

change effected by the use of force, whether so planned
or not. Upon the whole, the recent policy of liberalism
has been to further “social legislation”; that is, meas-
ures which add performance of social services to the
older functions of government. The value of this addi-
tion is not to be despised. It marks a decided move away
from laissez faire liberalism, and has considerable im-
portance in educating the public mind to a realization
of the possibilities of organized social control. It has
helped to develop some of the techniques that in any case
will be needed in a socialized economy. But the cause
of liberalism will be lost for a considerable period if it
is not prepared to go further and socialize the forces of
production, now at hand, so that the liberty of indi-
viduals will be supported by the very structure of eco-
nomic organization.

The ultimate place of economic organization in hu-
man life is to assure the secure basis for an ordered
expression of individual capacity and for the satisfac-
tion of the needs of man in non-economic directions.
The effort of mankind in connection with material pro-
duction belongs, as I said earlier, among interests and
activities that are, relatively speaking, routine in char-
acter, “routine” being defined as that which, without
absorbing attention and energy, provides a constant
basis for liberation of the values of intellectual, esthetic
and companionship life. Every significant religious and
moral teacher and prophet has asserted that the material
is instrumental to the good life. Nominally at least, this
idea is accepted by every civilized community. The

SOCIAL ACTION 89

transfer of the burden of material production from
human muscles and brain to steam, electricity and
chemical processes now makes possible the effective
actualization of this ideal. Needs, wants and desires are
always the moving force in generating creative action.
When these wants are compelled by force of conditions
to be directed for the most part, among the mass of man-
kind, into obtaining the means of subsistence, what
should be a means becomes perforce an end in itself.
Up to the present the new mechanical forces of produc-
tion, which are the means of emancipation from this
state of affairs, have been employed to intensify and
exaggerate the reversal of the true relation between
means and ends. Humanly speaking, I do not see how
it would have been possible to avoid an epoch having
this character. But its perpetuation is the cause of the
continually growing social chaos and strife. Its termina-
tion cannot be effected by preaching to individuals that
they should place spiritual ends above material means.
It can be brought about by organized social reconstruc-
tion that puts the results of the mechanism of abundance
at the free disposal of individuals. The actual corrosive
“materialism” of our times does not proceed from sci-
ence. It springs from the notion, sedulously cultivated
by the class in power, that the creative capacities of
individuals can be evoked and developed only in a strug-
gle for material possessions and material gain. We
either should surrender our professed belief in the su-
premacy of ideal and spiritual values and accommodate
our beliefs to the predominant material orientation, or

90 LIBERALISM AND

we should through organized endeavor institute the
socialized economy of material security and plenty thal
will release human energy for pursuit of higher values.

Since liberation of the capacities of individuals for
free, self-initiated expression is an essential part of the
creed of liberalism, liberalism that is sincere must will
the means that condition the achieving of its ends.
Regimentation of material and mechanical forces is the
only way by which the mass of individuals can be re-
leased from regimentation and consequent suppression
of their cultural possibilities. The eclipse of liberalism
is due to the fact that it has not faced the alternatives and
adopted the means upon which realization of its pro-
fessed aims depends. Liberalism can be true to its ideals
only as it takes the course that leads to their attainment.
The notion that organized social control of economic
forces lies outside the historic path of liberalism shows
that liberalism is still impeded by remnants of its earlier
laissez faire phase, with its opposition of society and the
individual. The thing which now dampens liberal ardor
and paralyzes its efforts is the conception that liberty and
development of individuality as ends exclude the use of
organized social effort as means. Earlier liberalism re-
garded the separate and competing economic action of
individuals as the means to social well-being as the end.
We must reverse the perspective and see that socialized
economy is the means of free individual development as
the end.

That liberals are divided in outlook and endeavor
while reactionaries are held together by community of

91

SOCIAL ACTION
interests and the ties of custom is well-nigh a common-
place. Organization of standpoint and belief among lib-
erals can be achieved only in and by unity of endeavor.
Organized unity of action attended by consensus of be-
liefs will come about in the degree in which social control
of economic forces is made the goal of liberal action.
The greatest educational power, the greatest force in
shaping the dispositions and attitudes of individuals, is
the social medium in which they live. The medium that
now lies closest to us is that of unified action for the
inclusive end of a socialized economy. The attainment of
a state of society in which a basis of material security
will release the powers of individuals for cultural expres-
sion is not the work of a day. But by concentrating upon
the task of securing a socialized economy as the ground
and medium for release of the impulses and capacities
men agree to call ideal, the now scattered and often con-
flicting activities of liberals can be brought to effective
unity.

It is no part of my task to outline in detail a program
for renascent liberalism. But the question of “what is to
be done” cannot be ignored. Ideas must be organized,
and this organization implies an organization of indi-
viduals who hold these ideas and whose faith is ready
to translate itself into action. Translation into action
signifies that the general creed of liberalism be formu-
lated as a concrete program of action. It is in organiza-
tion for action that liberals are weak, and without this
organization there is danger that democratic ideals may
go by default. Democracy has been a fighting faith.

LIBERALISM AND

92

When its ideals are reenforced by those of scientific
method and experimental intelligence, it cannot be
that it is incapable of evoking discipline, ardor and
organization. To narrow the issue for the future to a
struggle between Fascism and Communism is to invite a
catastrophe that may carry civilization down in the
struggle. Vital and courageous democratic liberalism is
the one force that can surely avoid such a disastrous
narrowing of the issue. I for one do not believe that
Americans living in the tradition of Jefferson and Lin-
coln will weaken and give up without a whole-hearted
effort to make democracy a living reality. This, I repeat,
involves organization.

The question cannot be answered by argument. Ex-
perimental method means experiment, and the question
can be answered only by trying, by organized effort.
The reasons for making the trial are not abstract or
recondite. They are found in the confusion, uncertainty
and conflict that mark the modern world. The reasons
for thinking that the effort if made will be successful
are also not abstract and remote. They lie in what the
method of experimental and cooperative intelligence has
already accomplished in subduing to potential human
use the energies of physical nature. In material produc-
tion, the method of intelligence is now the established
rule; to abandon it would be to revert to savagery. The
task is to go on, and not backward, until the method
of intelligence and experimental control is the rule
in social relations and social direction. Either we take
this road or we admit that the problem of social organi-

SOCIAL ACTION 93

zation in behalf of human liberty and the flowering of
human capacities is insoluble.

It would be fantastic folly to ignore or to belittle the
obstacles that stand in the way. But what has taken place,
also against great odds, in the scientific and industrial
revolutions, is an accomplished fact ; the way is marked
out. It may be that the way will remain untrodden. If so,
the future holds the menace of confusion moving into
chaos, a chaos that will be externally masked for a time
by an organization of force, coercive and violent, in
which the liberties of men will all but disappear. Even
so, the cause of the liberty of the human spirit, the cause
of opportunity of human beings for full development of
their powers, the cause for which liberalism enduringly
stands, is too precious and too ingrained in the human
constitution to be forever obscured. Intelligence after
millions of years of errancy has found itself as a method,
and it will not be lost forever in the blackness of night.
The business of liberalism is to bend every energy and
exhibit every courage so that these precious goods may
not even be temporarily lost but be intensified and ex-
panded here and now.